The Vicious Circles of System: A Kafkaesque Study of Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes

This paper analyses the Kafkaesque/Kafkan features of Kobo Abe’s novel The Woman in the as formulated by Kundera in “Kafka’s World.” For Kundera, in a Kafkaesque work human existence is bleakly represented through intermingling of tragedy and comedy in an indifferent world dominated by hegemonic systems. The Kafkaesque is characterised by the following: World is a huge forking labyrinthine institution where the man has been thrown to suffer its complexities, confrontation with the labyrinth makes his existence meaningless because freedom is a taboo in no man’s land, he is punished for an unknown sin for which he seeks justification from the superior authorities, but his efforts are viewed as ludicrous or comic despite the underlying sense of tragedy. (5) The Kafkaesque tendency to present tragic situation comically is also explored in Abe’s novel. The paper studies the effect of higher authorities exercising their power over man and the inscrutability of cosmic structures continuously undermining human freedom in nightmarish conditions. The paper establishes Kobo Abe in the literary world as a writer who portrays the hollowness and futility of human lives with a Kafkaesque touch.