砂の女

One time, during the spring break while I was going to Gaidai, my friend and I decided to go to the side of Japan that faces… the Sea of Japan. You know, just to see what’s over there. We visited the Tottori sand dunes.
I was recently looking through my old pictures from  06-07. I decided to make these sepia tone a la the movie, “砂の女" or, its English title, “The Woman in the Dunes.”
The film is about a woman who is the last person of her clan living in her village, that has slowly been consumed by the sand. A fellow (who we assume is a professor)  kind of stumbles upon her one day while collecting insects in the sand dunes. He stays with her, and maybe even falls in love with her at one point, however, in the end, she and her house in the sand do nothing but continually infiltrate every aspect of him and his life... just like how sand… infiltrates… EVERYTHING. I remember watching the film for my Japanese film class, hoping that the professor was going to be able to escape from the sand lady.

Oh, and there are sand people in it that are eerily reminiscent of the sand people in Star Wars. (the film was made in 1964).

I think the Tottori sand dunes were the biggest expanse of wide open space I have ever seen in Japan outside of the rice fields here in Tochigi. In a way, they are kind of beautiful.

Otherwise, it’s just a great big pile of sand.