The Woman in the Dunes - Machi Abe [60]
Something was crawling fitfully up the instep of his foot. Its manner of walking could hardly be like that if it belonged to the beetle family. He decided it must be some kind of ground bug, for it drew itself along with difficulty on its six weak legs. He didn’t even feel like finding out. Supposing for the time being it did belong to the beetle family; even, so he still hesitated, wondering whether he really felt like going after it or not. He was apparently incapable of a definite decision.
A breeze flipped the towel from his face. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a ridge of dunes glistening and golden. A smoothly rising curve cut off the line of gold and abruptly slipped away into the shadows. There was something strangely tense in the spatial composition, and he shuddered with an uncanny loneliness for people. (Yes, this certainly is a romantic landscape.… A setting like this would be a great attraction for young tourists these days. Precious, gilt-edged stock it is.… I can guarantee its future development as someone who’s experienced in this profession. But if you’re going to develop it, first you’ve got to advertise! Even flies won’t come if you don’t advertise. The place might just as well not be here if no one knows about it. It’s like having a precious stone and not finding a practical use for it. Well then, what shall we do? I’ll put the thing in the hands of a first-rate photographer and have him make me up some good-looking picture postcards. In the old days you used to find a beauty spot and then have your postcards made. But now, it’s common sense to have the cards made first … and afterwards think up a beautiful place. I have brought along two or three samples, if you’d care to look them over.) The poor postcard salesman had come with the intention of taking the villagers in, but he had been the one to be taken in, and in the end he had got sick and died. But then, he certainly could not imagine that the card man had been particularly eloquent. He had probably been surprisingly sincere in his hopes for the place and had doubtless staked all he had on the business. What in heaven’s name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature’s mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man’s understanding?
Until yesterday the very thought of this landscape had filled him with nausea. He had actually thought, in a fit of spleen, that the holes were just right for swindlers like picture-postcard vendors.
However, there was no reason to think of the life in the holes and the beauty of the landscape as being opposed to each other. Beautiful scenery need not be sympathetic to man. His own viewpoint in considering the sand to be a rejection of the stationary state was not madness … a 1/8-mm. flow … a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction. No. Just a minute. He would be in a spot if he were criticized for holding on to his round-trip ticket and not letting go of it. You like movies of wild animals and of war because you find that the same old day, following the same old yesterday, is waiting for you as soon as you come out of the movie house … you even like the films that stick so close to reality they nearly give you a heart attack. Is anybody really foolish enough to go to the movies with a real gun, loaded with real bullets? Certain kinds of mice that are said to drink their own urine in place of water, or insects that feed on spoiled meat, or nomadic tribes who know only the one-way ticket at best, can adjust their lives to the desert. If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn’t have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock. But nomads have gone so far as to change their