Five Modern Japanese Novelists

by Donald Keene

  At irregular intervals between 1932 and 1934, Kawabata published “Letters to My Parents” (Fubo e no tegami), addressed to the parents he had never known. He tells why he had been unwilling to have children, for fear they might inherit the “orphan’s disposition” from which he suffered. He declared that he was more comfortable with animals than with people. Toward the end of the last letter, he returned to a childhood memory. While his grandfather lay dying, the boy had escaped from the gloomy house night after night. The thought of his cruelty in leaving the old man alone had continued to torment him over the years. The letters conclude with the description of the death of a friend, a painter. Kawabata, with a practiced hand, closed the friend’s eyelids.

  His next work, published the month after the five letters to his dead parents, was “Lyric Poem” (Jojōka, 1932), a work devoted to musings on death that is almost Surrealist in its construction. Writing in 1934, Kawabata said that “Lyric Poem” was his favorite among his recent works. It is at once a distillation of his thought up to this time and an insight into his future work. He reveals his growing absorption with Buddhism, especially as a poetic and artistic system:

  Compared with the vision of the Buddhas and their lives in the world beyond as depicted in the Buddhist scriptures, how very realistic is the Westerner’s view of the other world! And how puny and vulgar…. It has seemed to me of late that the visionary passages in the Buddhist scriptures that describe past and future worlds are incomparably beautiful lyric poems.*

  He wrote in an autobiographical account published in the same year:

  I believe that the classics of the East, especially the Buddhist scriptures, are the supreme works of literature of the world. I revere the sutras not for their religious teachings but as literary visions…. I have received the baptism of modern Western literature and I have imitated it, but basically I am an oriental, and for fifteen years I have never lost sight of my heritage.

  Despite this avowal, undoubtedly sincere, Kawabata was far from attempting a return to the Japanese past. “Lyric Poem” draws on Christianity as well as Buddhism. The literary techniques are also those of modern European literature as practiced by Joyce and other contemporaries Kawabata had read, and even the details (as in the psychic vision a woman has of her lover) are drawn from a nonoriental world:

  You were listening to the music of Chopin. The walls of your room were pure white. Hung on opposite walls were an oil painting by Koga Harue and a print of a snow scene by Hiroshige. The wall tapestry, an Indian cotton print, had a pattern of birds of paradise. The covers on the chairs were white, but a greenish leather could be seen underneath. On both sides of the gas stove, which also was white, there were what looked like drawings of kangaroos. An album of photographs on the table was open to a picture of Isadora Duncan performing a classic Greek dance. On the whatnot in a corner of the room were some carnations left over from Christmas.

  Despite the exotic touches—Chopin, birds of paradise, kangaroos—Kawabata found something Japanese, even specifically Buddhist, in the scene. The insistence on whiteness had a special meaning: far from thinking of white as the absence of color, he believed that it contained all the colors. Again, the childlike simplicity of Koga’s Surrealist paintings struck him as being rooted in what he called “the old-fashioned oriental weakness for the poetic. A mist of distant yearning flows over the surface of the mirror of the intellect.” He concluded, “They are not merely children’s stories but vivid dreams of the surprise evoked in a child’s heart. They are extremely Buddhistic.”

  Kawabata moved back and forth between the worlds of East and West. He never manifested the unconditional admiration of the West found in Tanizaki’s early works, but he never rejected the West, either. Like the painter Koga Harue—who at the outset of his career used a palette similar to that of Paul Klee, moved to “oriental” colors, then returned once again to occidental colors, only to show renewed interest in oriental traditions shortly before his death—Kawabata’s development was by no means a linear “return to the East” after an initial fascination with occidental Modernism.

  In the spring of 1934 Kawabata visited the Yukawa Hot Springs. He paid a second visit in the autumn of the same year, and it was at this time that he began writing his most famous novel, Snow Country. The first chapter of the novel appeared in a magazine published in November 1935, and he published subsequent chapters in a variety of magazines until May 1937, apparently considering that each chapter could be read independently of the rest. The work was acclaimed by the critics and sold well. Kawabata had hitherto been known mainly for his critical essays, but this novel established him as a major novelist. Although everyone assumed that the book was complete, he added chapters in 1939 and 1940 and one last chapter in 1947.

  The plot of Snow Country, like that of other successful works by Kawabata, is at once simple and elusive. A well-to-do dilettante named Shimamura returns late one autumn to the hot spring in the mountains he had visited six months earlier. After the train has passed through a long tunnel into the “snow country,” it stops at a station where a girl in the same compartment asks the station master to look after her younger brother. When Shimamura arrives at the hot spring, a geisha, Komako, comes to his room at the inn. She has missed him more than he has missed her. She spends more and more time in his room, sometimes sober, sometimes very drunk. Although Shimamura is strongly attracted, he seems incapable of loving her. He also is attracted to Yōko, the girl he saw on the train. At the end of the novel there is a fire, and Yōko, who is in the burning building, leaps from the second story. Komako gathers her in her arms. Shimamura stands by helplessly, a bystander as always.

  Komako, a woman of strong emotions and open sensuality, dominates the work. She is Kawabata’s most successfully drawn female character, and if he had written no other work, this portrait would have earned him the reputation of being a master of feminine psychology. Yōko, although she appears only briefly, is almost equally appealing, but Shimamura is a cipher: the main thing we learn about him is that he poses as an expert on European ballet, even though he has never attended a performance. This special interest coincided with Kawabata’s fascination in the 1930s with the dance. The dates of Shimamura’s visit to the hot spring also coincide with Kawabata’s, but he denied the importance of whatever models may have existed for the story:

  The events and the emotions recorded in Snow Country are products more of my imagination than of reality. Especially with respect to the emotions attributed to Komako, what I have described is none other than my own sadness. I imagine that this is what has appealed to readers.

  Kawabata once said that Snow Country could have been broken off at any point. He had originally intended to write no more than a short story, but some material was left over, and he incorporated it in the story he wrote for a different magazine. One chapter led to the next. Even after he wrote the concluding chapter in 1947, he thought he should have written more about the relations between Komako and Yōko. Readers may have trouble understanding precisely what happens at the end of Snow Country, but the effect is appropriate to a notably elusive work.

  The glory of this novel is the evocativeness of its style. Almost everything that a more realistic author would have included in his account of the relations between Shimamura and Komako is either omitted or stated with such economy that the text must be read carefully. Kawabata relied on the possibilities for ambiguous yet expressive communication innate in the Japanese language. The conversations are not sparkling or even erotic but tend to be almost perversely indirect. Even as Komako insists that she is about to leave Shimamura’s room, we can sense her intention not to budge from his side. Snow Country conveys—perhaps better than any other modern Japanese novel—the special charm of the Japanese woman, and not only of the geisha. It would be hard to name a work of classical literature to which Kawabata was indebted, but the prevailing impression is close to the Heian writings. It is Modernist in the free associations that skip from one
perception to the next, but the ending is as tantalizingly obscure and aesthetically satisfying as any creation of traditional Japanese art.

  In 1938 a series of matches took place between the master of go and a young challenger. Kawabata, whose fondness for go went back to his middle-school years, reported the matches in newspaper articles published between June and December. He decided to rewrite the materials in the form of the novel The Master of Go (Meijin). This quite short novel, though begun in 1942, was not completed until 1954. Kawabata was attracted to go because a match is a thing of beauty even if it serves no useful purpose. The victor is by no means a young upstart eager to dethrone the old master, but despite his respect, even his reverence, for the old man, the defeat is foreordained. On one level The Master of Go is an effective, even exciting, account of men and their devotion to a game; on another level it is a statement by Kawabata on the nature of men’s consecration to art. The old master and the new master immerse themselves completely in a game that has no political, economic, or social significance; this also was Kawabata’s stance.

  During the war years Kawabata attempted to understand the special character of the country for which so many men were dying. He saw similarities between the Muromachi period, an age of warfare, and his own. In 1948, reflecting on the war, Kawabata wrote:

  I am one of the Japanese who was affected least and suffered least because of the war. There has been no conspicuous change in my prewar, wartime, and postwar works and no noticeable break. I did not experience any great inconvenience because of the war in either my artistic or my private life. And it goes without saying that I was never caught up in a surge of what is called divine possession to become a fanatical believer in or blind worshiper of Japan. I have always grieved for the Japanese with my own grief: that is all. As the result of the defeat, that grief has permeated my flesh and bones. But the defeat actually brought freedom of the spirit and the sense of what it means to live in peace.

  I consider that my life after the war consists of “remaining years” and that these remaining years are not mine but a manifestation of the tradition of beauty in Japan. I feel there is nothing unnatural about this.

  When during the war it became evident that Japan would be defeated, Kawabata’s chief consolation came from the classics, especially The Tale of Genji. He recalled his service as an air-raid warden in these terms:

  When I went out on patrol during an alert on nights when autumn or winter moonlight flooded little valleys where not a speck of human-generated light showed, The Tale of Genji, which I was then reading, drifted through my mind, and recollections of the people of long ago who had read The Tale of Genji in adversity shot through me. I thought I must go on living, along with these traditions that flowed within me.

  Here is another recollection:

  I would stand stock-still on the road in the cold of the night and feel my own sadness melt into the sadness of Japan. I felt there was a beauty that would perish if I died. My life did not belong to me alone. I thought I would live for the sake of the traditional beauty of Japan…. Such were my thoughts and I went on living. Perhaps the piteousness of a defeated country has provided me with an unexpected refuge by reinforcing the meaning of my life…. Perhaps I had to see the mountains and rivers of my country after it had been defeated before everything else could disappear.

  Kawabata’s postwar activity was, however, by no means that of a recluse. On the surface he was busier than ever, not only as a writer, but also as president of the PEN Club and even as the publisher of the Kamakura Library. His novels Thousand Cranes (Sembazuru) and The Sound of the Mountains (Yama no oto), published together in one volume, won the literary prize of the Japan Academy. Both are important, deeply moving works. He also published what have been termed “middlebrow fiction,” serialized in newspapers, and two remarkable novellas, House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1960–1961) and One Arm (Kataude, 1963–1964). The former is the story of a man named Eguchi who visits a secret house of assignation where old men, presumed to be incapable of sexual intercourse, lie beside heavily drugged, naked girls. The story of Eguchi’s five nights spent beside these mute women is carefully structured, and nowhere else is Kawabata’s genius for evoking beauty more conspicuously displayed. The naked women cannot be distinguished one from another by dress, jewelry, speech, or the other externals that normally enable us to form opinions about a person’s background and character, yet each remains distinct in the reader’s memory.

  One Arm opens with these startling lines: “‘I can let you have one of my arms for the night,’ said the girl. She took off her right arm at the shoulder and, with her left hand, laid it on my knee.”*

  The narrator—one of Kawabata’s rare uses of the first-person narration—converses with the arm even as memories of other women he has known come back to him. He and the girl’s arm lie peacefully together for a time, but suddenly the narrator decides to attach the girl’s arm to his own body: “In a trance, I removed my right arm and substituted the girl’s.” He sleeps, but when he awakes, he is terrified to see his own arm lying on the bed. He tears off the girl’s arm and replaces it with his own. Then he embraces her arm and kisses it.

  The intent of One Arm will probably never be known, and Kawabata may not have had a single meaning in mind. He may have been under the influence of drugs. But one can read the story for its moments of uncanny perception. The techniques employed are those of Surrealism, a return by Kawabata to his earliest period.

  After receiving the Nobel Prize in November 1968, Kawabata wrote almost nothing, though he made many false starts. He was lionized as the first Japanese to have received the prize, and a third set of his Complete Works was published. Mishima Yukio’s suicide in November 1970 was especially painful to Kawabata, who, years before, had discovered the talents of the younger man.

  On April 16, 1972, Kawabata went to an apartment overlooking the sea at Hayama where he was accustomed to writing manuscripts. He committed suicide by inhaling gas. There was no farewell note. Most Japanese were not surprised, finding his suicide hardly different from a natural death. Those who felt close to him, however, must have felt disappointed that not even the beauty that Kawabata had discovered in Japanese landscapes, in Japanese women, or in Japanese art had kept him from exploring the one realm that this perpetual traveler had never visited.

  *Yasunari Kawabata, “Jojōka, Lyric Poem,” trans. Francis Mathy, Monumenta Nipponica 26, nos. 3–4 (1971): 292.

  *Yasunari Kawabata, One Arm, in House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1969), p. 103.

  Mishima Yukio

  (1925–1970)

  Outside his own country Mishima Yukio is probably the most famous Japanese who ever lived. Europeans and Americans who would have difficulty naming even one Japanese emperor, politician, general, scientist, or poet are acquainted with Mishima’s name, if not his works. In large part, of course, this is the result of his spectacular suicide, but even before this event he was the only Japanese chosen by Esquire magazine in its selection of one hundred leading figures of the world, and the only Japanese who appeared on internationally televised programs.

  Mishima’s death on November 25, 1970, came as a shock to the Japanese. Many were alarmed at what they feared might be a recrudescence of the right-wing nationalism that had prevailed in Japan before 1945. Once the initial shock had passed, critics published explanations of why Mishima had killed himself and why, if he was determined to die, he had chosen to commit seppuku, the ritual disembowelment. A few authors, probably imagining reasons that might drive themselves to suicide, opined that Mishima killed himself because he had discovered he no longer could write. The prime minister of Japan labeled Mishima’s suicide an act of madness. Many other interpretations have since been published. My own, reduced to the simplest terms, is that his death was the logical culmination of a life consecrated to a particular kind of aesthetics.

  Mish
ima’s final compositions, a manifesto (geki) and two farewell poems to the world (jisei), portray himself as a rough-hewn soldier, so bitterly unhappy about the lamentable state of affairs prevailing in his country that he has chosen to offer his life by way of remonstration. Mishima directed that his posthumous name, the Buddhist name that would be inscribed on his tombstone, include the word bu for “martial.” Perhaps he really felt indignation and even anguish over the failure of the Self-Defense Force—the Japanese army—to maintain order when leftist radicals demonstrated, but it is hard for me to suppress the thought that such acts were a kind of self-hypnosis, part of his efforts to convince himself that he was not so much a writer as a patriot.

  In June 1970, on the night the security treaty with the United States came up for renewal, I was in a taxi with Mishima on our way to a restaurant. For ten years, ever since the demonstrations of 1960 against renewing the treaty, it had been widely predicted that the riots in 1970 would be on a much greater scale. Probably Mishima believed these predictions, and it may have been with the intention of defending the imperial palace against the rioters that he formed his tiny private army, the Shield Society. Of course, one hundred men could hardly prevent tens of thousands of demonstrators from breaking into the palace, but they could die, and that was Mishima’s real object. But when our taxi passed the Diet buildings, there was no sign of demonstrators, only bored policemen carrying shields and clubs they would not use that night. This may have been when Mishima decided he would have to kill himself, now that there was no chance of being killed on the palace steps.

  The last of his literary compositions was a tanka composed on November 23, 1970, two days before Mishima and the young men he had chosen to be the witnesses of his self-immolation set off for the headquarters of the Self-Defense Force:

  chiru wo itou Storm winds at night blow