The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

Author:Kobo Abe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307813732
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-07T10:00:00+00:00

20

HIS face was as stiff as starch, his breathing like a storm. His saliva tasted of dry scorched sugar … and such a terrible loss of energy. At least one glassful of water must have evaporated in perspiration. The woman arose sluggishly, keeping her head bent. Her sand-streaked face came to about the height of his eyes. Suddenly she blew her nose with her fingers and rubbed her hands with sand that she scooped up. Her trousers slipped down over her bending hips.

Annoyed, he turned his eyes away. Yet it was not quite right to say he was only annoyed. A strange feeling, different from dryness, lingered on the tip of his tongue. His member had been pulsating and vibrant without the rubber, although only for a short time, until he had been put off by the woman’s stupid expression. And now a lingering warmth remained in it. To call this a discovery would perhaps be exaggerating, but it was worth a moment’s attention.

He did not feel that he was particularly degenerate. But he was not at all disposed only to spiritual rape. It was like eating unsweetened tapioca. Spiritual rape meant that before he could hurt her, he would have to hurt himself. And why should he contract even a psychological venereal disease? That would be adding insult to injury. Was it true that a woman’s glands were so weak that they emitted blood just because a man looked at her?

He vaguely sensed that there were two kinds of sexual desire. For example, on the basis of the Möbius circle, when you courted a girl, you always began, it seemed, with lectures on nutrition and taste … that is, before you got around to sex. Food exists only in an abstract sense for anybody dying of hunger; there isn’t any such thing as the taste of Kobe beef or Hiroshima oysters. But once one’s belly is full, then one begins to discern differences in taste and textures. Sexual desire was the same. First came desire in general, and only after that did particular sexual tastes evolve. And sex couldn’t be discussed in general; it depended on time and place … sometimes you needed a dose of vitamins … sometimes a bowl of eels and rice. It was a well-thought-out theory, but regrettably not a single girl friend had offered herself to him in support of it, with a readiness to experience sexual desire in general or sex in particular. That was natural. No man or woman is wooed by theory alone. He knew this, but he naïvely observed the theory of the Möbius circle and kept repeatedly pushing the doorbell of an empty house, only because he did not want to commit spiritual rape.

To be sure, he himself wasn’t so romantic as to dream of pure sexual relations. You could do that when you were looking death in the eye … like the bamboo grass that bears seeds just as it is beginning to wither … like starving mice

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