砂の女

I loved the premise of the book. Both the book and movie are exceptional. But my enjoyment of it suffered because it was way, way too hard for me.

It wasn't the extensive vocabulary - and it really was extensive, from geology and entomology terms to everything under the sun. It's that this book reminded me of my early days of learning Japanese, when I truly thought the language was vague. So many sentences in this book felt vague, even when I had looked up all the words and reread them again and again. Example snippet of a remembered dialogue:

「分りますとも。実用教育には、どうしたって、相対主義的な要素が入りこんできちゃいますからねえ。」

「そうじゃないんだ。自分自身が、砂になる……砂の眼でもって、物をみる……一度死んでしまえば、もう死ぬ気づかいをして、右往左往することもないわけですから……」

「理想主義者なんだなあ、先生は……思うに、先生は、生徒たちをこわがっているんじゃないんですか？」

The protagonist goes off on wild, often philosophical tangents all the time. One moment he will be describing what's happening in front of him, the next he will be recounting a conversation he had years ago with someone, or an anecdote he heard about, or he will ruminate on the nature of human relationships, all the time using roundabout ways of expression and metaphors (which were all brilliant as long as you're not too disoriented to get them, like I was much of the time).

My goal is to get much, much better in Japanese and then revisit this book (and others by this author) in several years, when I can hopefully get much more out of it.

The movie adaptation is quite famous and very good, but the book is great, too. I do love myself some surrealism, and this is more or less the only book i've reviewed delivering on that.

A man gets trapped in a pit of sand, together with a woman living in that pit. We follow him as his thoughts spiral into all sorts of strange delusions, and he tries to escape time and time again. Totally unique and a fascinating take on routine, on accepting (or resisting) the deck of cards dealt, on finding the right attitude to keep on living. As fun finding your own interpretation of it as it is to follow the actual story.