Beauty and Sadness

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Keiko, however, unaware that these were the hidden charms of the city, saw only the beauty of Otoko. She was fascinated.

  So Keiko had appeared out of a pale bluish haze and begged to be taken in to study painting with her. The fervor of that appeal shocked Otoko. And then suddenly Keiko’s arms were around her, and she seemed to be in the embrace of a young sorceress. It was like an unexpected throb of desire.

  But Otoko demurred and asked if her father and mother knew. “Otherwise I can’t give you an answer. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Both my parents are dead,” said Keiko. “I can make up my own mind.”

  Otoko looked at her quizzically. “Don’t you have an aunt or uncle, or any brothers or sisters?”

  “I’m a burden to my brother and his wife. Now that they have a baby, I seem to be more trouble than ever.”

  “Because of the baby?”

  “I’m fond of it, naturally. They don’t like my way of cuddling it.”

  Four or five days after Keiko settled down with her, Otoko received a letter from the brother saying that she was a wild, headstrong girl, and probably would not even make a good maid, but that he hoped Otoko would take her in. Keiko’s clothing and other belongings also arrived. They gave the impression that she came from a well-to-do family.

  Otoko soon realized that there must have been something abnormal about the way Keiko cuddled the baby.

  Was it a week after Keiko had come? She had coaxed Otoko to do her hair for her, any way she liked, but in handling it Otoko happened to tug a few strands. “Pull harder!” Keiko had said. “Grab it up so that I hang by it!”

  Otoko let go. Twisting around toward her, Keiko pressed her lips and teeth to the back of Otoko’s hand. Then she said: “Miss Ueno, how old were you at your first kiss?”

  “Really, now!”

  “I was three. I remember distinctly. He was an uncle on my mother’s side, about thirty, I suppose. But I liked him, and once when he was sitting alone in the parlor I toddled right up and kissed him. He was so startled he clapped his hand to his mouth.”

  There on the balcony beside the river Otoko recalled the story of that childish kiss. The lips that had kissed a man at three now belonged to her, and had just held her little finger.

  “I remember the spring rain the first time you took me to Mt. Arashi,” said Keiko.

  “So do I.”

  “And the woman at the noodle shop.”

  A few days after Keiko’s first visit Otoko took her around to see the Golden Pavilion, the Moss Temple, the Ryoanji Temple, and then Mt. Arashi. They had gone into a noodle shop on the river bank near the Togetsu Bridge. The old woman at the shop said she was sorry it was raining.

  “I like the rain,” Otoko replied. “It’s a nice spring rain.”

  “Oh, thank you, ma’am,” said the woman politely. She made a little bow.

  Keiko looked at Otoko, and whispered: “Was she speaking for the weather?”

  “What?” The woman’s remark had seemed quite natural to Otoko. “Yes, I imagine so. For the weather.”

  “That’s interesting,” Keiko went on. “I like the idea of saying thank you on behalf of the weather. Is that what Kyoto people do?”

  To be sure, you could interpret her remark that way. Apologizing to them for the rain was natural enough. But Otoko’s reply had not been from sheer politeness; she really did like Mt. Arashi in a gentle spring rain. The old woman thanked her for that. She seemed to be speaking for the weather, or for Mt. Arashi in the rain. It was also a natural greeting from someone who had a shop there, but to Keiko it had sounded odd.

  “Marvelous noodles, aren’t they?” said Keiko. “I like this place.” Their taxi driver had recommended it. Because of the rain Otoko had hired the taxi for half a day.

  Even though it was the cherry blossom season, surprisingly few people were willing to come here in the rain, which was another reason why Otoko liked it. Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colors of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain.

  The Moss Temple and Ryoanji were also lovely in the spring rain. At the Moss Temple a single red camellia lay atop little white andromeda blossoms scattered over the wet moss, red on white on green. The perfectly formed camellia lay face up as if it had bloomed there afloat. And the rain-wet stones of the stone garden at Ryoanji glistened in all their hues.

  “When you use a vase of old Iga ware in the tea ceremony, you moisten it first, you know,” said Otoko. “It’s the same effect.” But Keiko was not familiar with Iga ware, nor did she have any particular feeling for the colors of the stone garden before her.

  However, once Otoko had pointed them out to her, she was impressed by the raindrops glittering in the young pines along the path through the temple compound. Each needle was like a flower stem with a single droplet of rain clinging to its very tip; the trees seemed all abloom with dew flowers. Easily overlooked, they were subtle blossoms of the spring rain. The maples and other trees also had raindrops on their budding leaves.

  Raindrops clinging to the tips of pine needles could be seen anywhere, but it was the first time Keiko had really noticed them, and so they seemed to belong to Kyoto. The raindrops on the pine needles and the greeting of the old woman at the noodle shop were among Keiko’s first impressions of Kyoto. Not only was the city new to her, she was seeing it with Otoko.

  “I wonder how the woman at the noodle shop is,” said Keiko. “We haven’t been back to Mt. Arashi since.”

  “That’s true. But I like it best of all in winter, when the pools in the river look deep and cold. Let’s go out then.”

  “Must we wait till winter?”

  “Winter will be here soon enough.”

  “It won’t be soon at all! It’s not even midsummer, let alone fall.”

  Otoko laughed. “We can go any time! We can go tomorrow.”

  “Let’s. I’ll tell the noodle shop woman I like Mt. Arashi in the heat of summer and she’ll probably thank me. For the hot weather.”

  “And for Mt. Arashi.”

  Keiko looked out at the river. “Otoko, by winter there won’t be any more of these couples walking along the banks.”

  Many young people were out on the two levees used as promenades that separated the Kamo from the stream under the balconies and from the canal along its eastern bank. Only a few were with children—almost all of them seemed to be lovers. Young couples were walking close together, or sitting at the water’s edge leaning against each other. As dusk gathered, their numbers grew.

  “Of course it’s much too cold here in winter,” said Otoko.

  “I doubt it would last till winter.”

  “What would last?”

  “Their love. Some of them will stop wanting to see each other by then.”

  “Is that what’s on your mind?” Keiko nodded. “Why must you worry about that, at your age?”

  “Because I’m not a fool like you, for twenty years loving someone who spoiled your life!”

  Otoko was silent.

  “Even though Mr. Oki deserted you, you’ve refused to recognize it.”

  “Please don’t talk like that.” As Otoko turned away, Keiko reached out to smooth up a few stray hairs at the back of Otoko’s neck.

  “Otoko, why don’t you desert me?”

  “What!”

  “I’m the only person you can desert. So go ahead.”

  “Whatever can you mean?” Otoko seemed to parry her lightly, but looked straight into her eyes. She ran her fingertips over the hairs Keiko had smoothed.

  “I mean the way Mr. Oki deserted you,” said Keiko tenaciously, peering into Otoko’s eyes. “Though apparently you’ve nev
er been willing to think about it that way.”

  “Must you use a word like ‘desert’?”

  “It’s best to be precise.” There was a malicious glint in her eye. “What would you call it?”

  “We parted.”

  “But you didn’t! Even now he’s there within you, and you’re within him.”

  “Keiko, what are you trying to tell me? I can’t understand you.”

  “Today I thought you were going to abandon me.”

  “But I apologized, didn’t I?”

  “I apologized to you.”

  Otoko had brought her here to Kiyamachi for a reconciliation, but perhaps that was no longer possible. Evidently it was Keiko’s temperament to be dissatisfied with a placid love, so she was always crossing Otoko, or quarreling with her, or sulking. Still, her confession to having spent the night with Oki had wounded Otoko. The Keiko who seemed to be under her control had turned into some strange creature attacking her. Keiko had said she would take revenge on Oki for her sake, but to Otoko it seemed Keiko was taking revenge on her. Also, she felt a new horror toward Oki as a man. How dare he trifle with her protégée, when he must have other women as well?

  “You aren’t going to abandon me?” Keiko asked.

  “If you keep insisting, I will! That would be best for you anyway.”

  “Stop it! That’s not what I meant.” Keiko shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking of my own good. As long as I’m with you …”

  “Being apart from me would certainly be best for you.” Otoko was trying to speak calmly.

  “Are you already apart from me, in your heart?”

  “Of course not!”

  “I’m glad! I felt so wretched, wondering if you were through with me.”

  “But that was your idea.”

  “Mine?… You think I’d leave you?”

  Otoko said nothing.

  “Never in my life!” Keiko burst out, and again grasped Otoko’s little finger and bit it.

  “Ouch!” Otoko shrank back. “That hurt, you know!”

  “I meant it to.”

  Dinner arrived. As the waitress arranged the dishes Keiko turned primly away and sat gazing at a cluster of lights on Mt. Hiei. Otoko made conversation with the waitress, keeping one hand over the other. She was afraid the teeth marks were visible.

  When they were alone again Keiko looked down at her soup bowl, took a morsel of eel with her chopsticks, and said: “But you really ought to desert me.”

  “You are stubborn, aren’t you?”

  “I’m the kind of girl that’s deserted by her lover. Do you think I’m stubborn?”

  Otoko asked herself if women were more stubborn toward each other than toward men, and felt the needle prick of the same old guilty thought. Her finger was still stinging too, as if pierced by a needle. Had she herself taught Keiko to inflict pain?

  One day, not long after they began living together, Keiko had come running in from the kitchen, saying the oil in the frying pan had spattered.

  “Did you get burned?”

  “It stings!” Keiko thrust her hand out to Otoko. The tip of one finger was red. Otoko took the hand.

  “It doesn’t look bad,” she said, and quickly stuck the finger in her mouth. Startled by the touch of her tongue on it, she took it out again. This time Keiko put the finger in her own mouth.

  “Does it help to lick it?”

  “Keiko, what about your frying pan?”

  “I forgot!” She ran back to the kitchen.

  Later—when had it been?—Otoko somehow began toying with her at night, pressing her lips on Keiko’s eyelids, or nibbling at her sensitive ears until she squirmed and moaned. That led Otoko on.

  All the while Otoko remembered that long, long ago Oki had toyed with her the same way. Perhaps because she was so young, he had been in no hurry to kiss her on the mouth. As she felt his lips again and again on her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, she was lulled into utter submission. Keiko was two or three years older, and of the same sex, but she responded even more quickly. Otoko soon found her irresistible. However, the thought that she was repeating Oki’s old caresses made her feel a choking sense of guilt. But it also made her quiver with vitality.

  “Don’t do that. Please!” Yet as Keiko spoke she nestled her bare breast against Otoko’s. “Isn’t your body the same as mine?”

  Otoko drew back.

  Keiko clung to her more closely. “Isn’t it? Just the same as mine!” She waited a moment. “It really is, you know.”

  Otoko suspected that she was not a virgin. Keiko’s sudden verbal thrusts were still unfamiliar to her.

  “We’re not the same,” Otoko murmured, as Keiko’s hand came groping for her breast. The hand moved without hesitation, but there seemed to be shyness in its touch. “Don’t do that!” Otoko clutched Keiko’s hand.

  “You’re not being fair!” Now there was strength in Keiko’s fingers.

  Years ago, at fifteen, when she felt Oki’s hand on her breasts Otoko had said: “Don’t do that. Please!” Exactly those words had appeared in his novel. She would probably have remembered them anyway, but because they were in the book they seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

  And yet Keiko had said the same thing. Was it because she had read A Girl of Sixteen? Was this what any girl would say?

  The novel also had a description of Otoko’s breasts, along with something Oki had said about the bliss of touching them.

  Because Otoko had never nursed a baby, her nipples still retained their rich color. Even after twenty years that color had not faded. But since her early thirties her breasts had begun to shrink.

  Probably Keiko had noticed their slackness in the bath, and made sure of it when she touched them. Otoko wondered if she would mention it, but she never did. Nor was anything said when Otoko’s breasts responded to Keiko’s caresses by steadily becoming fuller. Keiko’s silence was odd, since she must have considered it a victory.

  Sometimes Otoko felt that the swelling of her breasts was morbid and evil, sometimes she felt terribly ashamed; above all, she was astonished by the way her body, at almost forty, was changing. That was very different from what she had felt at fifteen, when the shape of her breasts changed under Oki’s caresses, and again at sixteen, when she was pregnant.

  After her parting from Oki no one had touched her breasts for over two decades. Meanwhile her youth, and her chance to marry, had passed. It was the hand of another woman—Keiko—that had touched them once again.

  Still, Otoko had had many opportunities for love and marriage since coming to Kyoto with her mother. But she had avoided them. As soon as she realized that a man was in love with her, memories of Oki were revived. Rather than mere recollections, they were her reality. When she parted from Oki she thought she would never marry. Distraught by sorrow, she could hardly plan ahead to the next day, much less to the distant future. But the thought of never marrying had crept into her mind, and in time it became an inflexible resolution.

  Of course Otoko’s mother hoped for her to marry. She had moved to Kyoto to keep her away from Oki, and to calm her, not with the intention of settling down permanently. Even in Kyoto her anxiety over her daughter remained. The first time she brought up a marriage proposal was when Otoko was nineteen. It was at the Nembutsu Temple in Adashino, deep in the Saga plain, on the night of the Ceremony of the Thousand Lights.

  Otoko noticed tears in her mother’s eyes as she looked at the thousand lights burning before the countless little weathered gravestones, memorials to the unmourned dead, that stood in rows across the gravel bed symbolizing the children’s Limbo. A sense of mortality hung in the air. The feeble candle flames flickering there in the dusk made the gravestones seem all the more melancholy.

  It was dark as they walked back together along a country road.

  “My, but it’s lonely,” her mother said. “Don’t you feel lonely, Otoko?” This time the word “lonely” seemed to have a different meaning. She began talking about a
marriage proposal for Otoko that had come by way of a friend in Tokyo.

  “I feel guilty toward you because I can’t marry,” said Otoko.

  “There’s no such thing as a woman who can’t marry!”

  “But there is.”

  “If you don’t, we’ll both be among the unmourned dead.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “They’re the ones who have no relatives left to mourn them.”

  “I know, but I can’t imagine what that would mean.” She paused. “You’re dead, after all.”

  “It’s not just when you’re dead. A woman without husband or children must be like that even while she’s still alive. Suppose I didn’t have you. You’re still young, but …” Her mother hesitated. “You often paint pictures of your baby, don’t you? How long do you expect to go on doing that?”

  Otoko did not reply.

  Her mother told her all she knew about the proposed marriage partner, a bank clerk. “If you’d like to meet him, let’s make a visit to Tokyo.”

  “What do you suppose I see before me as I listen to you?” Otoko asked.

  “You’re seeing something?”

  “Iron bars. I see the iron bars on the windows of that psychiatric ward.”

  Her mother was silenced.

  Otoko received several more proposals while her mother was alive.

  “It’s no good thinking about Mr. Oki,” her mother said, urging her to marry. It was more an appeal than a warning. “There’s nothing you can do. Waiting for Mr. Oki is like waiting for the past—time and the river won’t flow backward.”

  “I’m not waiting for anyone,” Otoko replied.

  “You just keep thinking of him? You can’t forget him?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Are you sure?… You were only a child when he seduced you—an innocent child, if ever there was one—so maybe that’s why it’s left a scar. I used to hate him for being cruel to such a child!”

  Otoko remembered her mother’s words. She wondered if it was because of her youth and innocence that she had had such a love. Perhaps that explained her blind, insatiable passion. When a spasm gripped her and she bit his shoulder she would not even realize that blood was flowing.