Beauty and Sadness

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Long after separating from Oki, she was shocked to read in A Girl of Sixteen that on his way to meet her he would be trying to decide how to make love to her, and that he usually did exactly as he had planned. She found it appalling that a man’s heart would “throb with joy as he walked along thinking about it.” To a spontaneous young girl like Otoko it had been inconceivable that a man would plan in advance his lovemaking techniques, their sequence, and the like. She accepted whatever he did, gave whatever he asked. Her youth made her all the more unquestioning. Oki had described her as an extraordinary girl, a woman among women. Thanks to her, he wrote, he had experienced all the ways of making love.

  When she read that, Otoko burned with humiliation. But she could not suppress her lively memories of his lovemaking; her body tensed and began to quiver. Finally the tension was released, and delight and satisfaction spread through her whole body. Her past love had come back to life.

  It was not only the vision of the iron bars of a hospital window that Otoko saw on her way home along the dark road from the Ceremony of the Thousand Lights. She also saw herself lying in Oki’s embrace.

  If he had not written about it, perhaps that vision of herself would not have remained alive for so many years.

  Otoko had paled with jealous anger and despair when Keiko told her that at the critical moment in Oki’s embrace she had called her name—“and he couldn’t do another thing!” But beneath those emotions she felt that Oki had also remembered her. Had not a vision of her lying in his arms come sharply before him at that instant?

  As time passed, the memory of their embrace was gradually becoming purified within Otoko, changing from physical to spiritual. She herself was not now pure; nor was Oki, in all likelihood. Yet their long-ago embrace, as she now saw it, seemed pure. That memory—herself and not herself, unreal and yet real—was a sacred vision sublimated from the memory of their mutual embrace.

  When she recalled what he had taught her, and imitated it in making love to Keiko, she feared that the sacred vision might be stained or even destroyed. But it remained inviolate.

  Keiko was in the habit of using a depilatory cream to remove hair from her legs and arms, and began to smear it on in Otoko’s presence. At first she had done it in private. When Otoko would ask her about an odd smell coming from the bathroom, she would not reply. Otoko was unacquainted with depilatories, having never needed one.

  Then she happened to see Keiko sitting with one knee drawn up, smoothing on the cream. Otoko frowned.

  “Such a nasty smell! What is it?” When the hairs came out in the cream as it was being wiped off, Otoko covered her eyes. “Please don’t do that! It makes my flesh crawl.” She shivered and felt herself breaking out in goose pimples. “Do you have to do such a repulsive thing?”

  “But doesn’t everyone?”

  Otoko was silent.

  “Wouldn’t it make your flesh crawl to touch a hairy skin?”

  Still Otoko did not answer.

  “I’m a woman, after all.”

  So she was doing it for Otoko. Even for another woman, Keiko wanted to have a woman’s silky skin. Otoko felt oppressed both by her own sense of repugnance at seeing the hair removed and by the feelings that Keiko’s frankness had aroused. The acrid smell lingered in her nostrils even after Keiko went to the bath to wash off the rest of the cream.

  When Keiko came back she pulled up her skirt and stretched out a sleek milk-white leg. “Touch it and see. It’s all smooth now.” Otoko glanced down, but did not put out her hand. Keiko stroked her shin with her right hand, and looked at Otoko as if wondering what could be wrong. “Is something bothering you?” she asked. Otoko avoided her eyes.

  “Keiko, from now on please don’t do it in front of me.”

  “I never want to hide anything from you again. I have no more secrets from you.”

  “Surely you needn’t show me something I find offensive.”

  “You’ll get used to it. It’s just like trimming toenails.”

  “You shouldn’t do your nails in front of people either. When you clip your nails you let them fly.… Cup your hand so the clippings won’t get away.”

  Keiko meekly agreed.

  After that, however, Keiko neither flaunted nor concealed her efforts to remove hair from her arms and legs. But Otoko never got used to it. Whether the depilatory cream had been improved or Keiko had substituted a different one, the smell was no longer quite so bad; still, the whole process made Otoko queasy. She could not bear to watch the shin and underarm hairs come out as the cream was wiped away. She would leave the room. Yet beneath her repugnance a flame flickered and vanished, and flickered up again. That small, distant flame was barely visible to her mind’s eye, but so calm, so pure, that it was hard to believe it was a flicker of lust. It reminded her of Oki and herself all those years ago. Her queasiness at seeing Keiko remove hair had within it a feeling of contact between woman and woman, a direct pressure on her own skin; and her first reaction had been one of nausea. But when she thought of Oki the queasiness miraculously subsided.

  In his embrace she had never had that feeling of queasiness; nor was she even aware of whether Oki himself was hairy. Did she lose her sense of reality? Now, with Keiko, she was even freer, she had developed a bold, middle-aged eroticism. It had amazed her to learn through Keiko that she had ripened as a woman during her long years alone. She feared that had her new lover been a man the vision she secretly guarded within her—the sacred vision of her love with Oki—would have vanished at his touch.

  Otoko had failed in her early suicide attempt, but she always wished that she had died. Better still, she felt, to have died in childbirth—before she tried to kill herself, and before her own baby died. Yet as the months and years slipped by, these thoughts cleansed the wound she had received from Oki.

  “You’re more than I deserve. It’s a love I never dreamed I’d find. Happiness like this is worth dying for.…” Even now Oki’s words had not faded from her memory. The dialogue in his novel echoed them and seemed to have taken on a life apart from either Oki or herself. Perhaps the lovers of old were no more, but she had the nostalgic consolation, in the midst of her sadness, that their love was forever enshrined in a work of art.

  Otoko’s mother had left behind a razor she had used for shaving her face. Little as she needed it, Otoko would occasionally take it out—perhaps once a year, as if impelled by some memory—and shave the nape of her neck and the hairline at her forehead. One day when she saw Keiko begin to spread on that depilatory cream she suddenly announced: “Keiko, I’ll shave you.” She took her mother’s razor out of the drawer of the dressing table.

  As soon as she saw the razor Keiko exclaimed, “No, no, I’m afraid!” and fled from the room. Otoko pursued her all the more eagerly.

  “It’s not dangerous! Please, let me!”

  Once caught, Keiko reluctantly allowed herself to be brought back to the dressing table. But when Otoko soaped her arm and applied the razor, she noticed with surprise that Keiko’s fingers were trembling.

  “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. Just keep your arm steady.”

  However, she found Keiko’s anxiety stimulating. It was a temptation. Her own body tensed, and strength seemed to flow into her shoulders.

  “Maybe I’d better let the underarm go this time,” said Otoko. “But your face won’t be any trouble.”

  “Wait, let me catch my breath,” Keiko begged.

  Otoko shaved above her eyebrows and under her lip. While the hairline around her forehead was being shaved Keiko kept her eyes tight shut. Face tilted up, she rested her head on Otoko’s supporting hand. That long, slender throat caught Otoko’s attention. It was a curiously innocent-looking throat, delicate and shapely, glowing with youth. Otoko held her razor still.

  Keiko opened her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  The thought had come to Otoko that if she thrust her razor into this lovely throat, Keiko would die. At this moment she could easily kill her with
a single stroke against the loveliest part of her body.

  Her own slender, girlish throat had surely not been so beautiful, but once when Oki’s arm was around it she had protested that he was strangling her. Then he had squeezed even harder.

  The choking sensation came back to her as she looked at Keiko. She began to feel dizzy.

  It was the only time Otoko shaved her. After that Keiko always refused, and Otoko did not insist. When she opened the drawer of the dressing table for a comb or whatever, she would see her mother’s razor. Sometimes it reminded her of that faint murderous impulse that had flitted through her mind. If she had killed Keiko, she herself would not have gone on living. Later that impulse seemed like a vaguely familiar wraith. Was that another time when she missed a chance to die?

  Otoko realized that in that fleeting murderous impulse lurked her old love for Oki. At the time Keiko had not yet met him. She had not put herself between them.

  Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain.

  The white lotus still there before her inner eye, Otoko shifted her gaze to the lights of the Kiyamachi tea houses reflected in the stream below. For some time she looked down at them. Then she looked at the dark range of the Eastern Hills, beyond Gion. The softly rounded hills were peaceful, but the darkness within them seemed to be flowing secretly toward her. The headlights of automobiles coming and going along the opposite bank, the couples on the promenades, the lamps and people on the balconies lining this side of the river—all these Otoko saw without really seeing them, as the night scene of the Eastern Hills spread out in her mind.

  I’ll go ahead with my Ascension of an Infant, Otoko told herself. If I don’t paint it right away, I may never be able to. It’s already on the verge of turning into something different … losing all the love and sadness. Was this rush of feeling because she saw the lotus in the flames? It began to seem as if Keiko were the lotus. Why did the white lotus bloom in fire? Why did it not wither away?

  “Keiko,” she said suddenly, “are you in a good humor again?”

  “If you are.” Keiko’s tone seemed coquettish. “Tell me, which of your sadnesses have been deepest?” Otoko asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she answered casually, “I’ve had so many I can’t say. I’ll try to remember all of them, and let you know. But my sadnesses are brief.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yes.”

  Otoko looked hard at her. Speaking as calmly as possible, she said: “There’s one thing I want to ask of you tonight. Please don’t go to Kamakura again.”

  “Do you mean to see Mr. Oki? Or his son?”

  Her question stabbed Otoko. “Either one, of course!”

  “I only went to get revenge for you!”

  “Are you still talking like that? What a frightening girl you are!” Otoko’s expression changed, and she shut her eyes as if to hold back unforeseen tears.

  “You’re such a coward.…” Keiko rose and went behind Otoko. She pressed down her shoulders with both hands, and then played with her ears. As Otoko sat there vacantly, she could hear the murmur of the flowing stream.

  STRANDS OF BLACK HAIR

  We have a visitor, dear!” Fumiko called to Oki from the kitchen where she was preparing breakfast. “A great big Mrs. Mouse is honoring us, hiding under the stove.” Sometimes his wife taunted him by using exaggeratedly polite language.

  “Is that so?”

  “She even seems to have her little offspring along.”

  “Oh?”

  “Really, you ought to come see.… The baby mouse just peeped out, and he has the sweetest face.”

  “Hmm.”

  “He looked at me with beautiful sparkling black eyes.”

  Oki said nothing. The pungent aroma of miso soup drifted into the dining room, where he was reading the morning newspaper.

  “Now the rain’s leaking in! Right into the kitchen. Can you hear it, dear?”

  It was raining when he woke up, but now it had become a heavy downpour. The wind that swayed the pines and bamboos on the hill had veered around to the east and was driving the rain in from that side.

  “How could I, with all the rain and wind?”

  “Won’t you come and look?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Those poor little raindrops—hurled against the roof tiles, and squeezed through cracks, like teardrops weeping in on us …”

  “You’ll have me crying too.”

  “Let’s set the wire trap tonight. I think it’s up on the closet shelf. Will you get it down for me later, please?”

  “Are you sure you want to catch Mrs. Mouse and her sweet little offspring in a trap?” said Oki mildly, without looking up from his newspaper.

  “And what about the leak?”

  “How bad is it? Isn’t that just the way the wind is blowing? Tomorrow I’ll get up on the roof and see.”

  “That’s dangerous for an old man. I can have Taichiro climb up.”

  “Who’s an old man?”

  “You retire at fifty-five in most businesses, don’t you?”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Maybe I should retire too.”

  “Do, whenever you please.”

  “I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.”

  “The day you die.”

  “Indeed!”

  “I’m sorry,” Fumiko apologized, and then added in her usual tone: “I only meant you can go on writing a long, long time.”

  “That’s not a very pleasant outlook, especially with a nagging wife. It’s like being prodded by the devil’s pitchfork.”

  “Really! When did I ever nag you?”

  “You can be a nuisance, you know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, jealousy, for example.”

  “All women are jealous, but you taught me long ago that it’s a bitter, dangerous medicine … a double-edged sword.”

  “To wound your partner and yourself.”

  “No matter what, I’m too old for double suicide or divorce.”

  “Old couples getting divorced are bad enough, but there’s nothing sadder than when they commit suicide together. It must make an old person feel agitated to see such articles in the papers. Even more so than the way young people feel about the suicide of young lovers.”

  “That’s because you were agitated about double suicide once yourself, a long time ago.… Anyway, you didn’t let your young girl friend know you wanted to die with her. Maybe you should have. She killed herself, but she never dreamed you were willing to die too. Don’t you feel sorry for her?”

  “She didn’t kill herself.”

  “She meant to. It’s the same thing.”

  Fumiko was talking about Otoko again. Meanwhile he could hear oil sizzling in a skillet, probably for pork with cabbage. The aroma of fermented bean paste was becoming stronger.

  “Your miso soup must be getting overdone,” Oki remarked.

  “All right, all right. I know I can’t please you with that precious soup—you’ve complained about it often enough, ordering different kinds of miso from all over the country.… To pickle your wife in it, I suppose.”

  “Do you know how to write the name for that soup in Chinese?”

  “Can’t you just write it phonetically?”

  “You repeat the character for ‘honorable’ three times.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s because it was always so important in the cuisine, and so tricky to get just right.”

  “Maybe your honorable miso is feeling cross this morning because your precious soup wasn’t treated respectfully enough.”

  She was taunting him again. Oki came from the western part of Japan, and had never really mastered Tokyo polite speech; Fumiko, however, had been brought up in Tokyo, so he often asked her help with it. Yet he did not always accept wh
at she told him. A tenacious argument would turn into an endless squabble, and he would declare that Tokyo speech was only a vulgar dialect with a shallow tradition. In Kyoto or Osaka, he would insist, even ordinary gossip was usually very polite, quite unlike Tokyo gossip. All sorts of things—mountains and rivers, houses, streets, heavenly bodies, even fish and vegetables—were referred to with polite expressions.

  “In that case, you’d better ask Taichiro,” she would say, dropping the argument. “After all, he’s a scholar.”

  “What would he know about it? He may know something about literature, but he’s never studied polite language. Look at the sloppy way he and his friends talk! Even in his articles he can’t write proper Japanese.”

  Actually, Oki disliked either consulting his son or being instructed by him. He preferred to ask his wife. But although Fumiko was a Tokyoite, his questions often left her confused.

  Again this morning he found himself complaining about the decay of language.

  “In the past, scholars knew their Chinese and could write a correct, well-turned prose.”

  “People don’t talk like that. Funny new words get born every day, like those baby mice, and it doesn’t matter to them what they nibble at. Words change so fast it makes your head spin.”

  “So they have only a short life, and even if they survive they’re dated—like the novels we write. It’s rare for one to last five years.”

  “Well, maybe it’s enough if a new word lasts overnight.” Fumiko brought in the breakfast tray. “I’ve done well to survive too, all these years since you were thinking of dying with that girl.”

  “Because there’s no retirement age in the housewife business. Too bad.”

  “But there’s divorce. I’ve wanted to know myself what it feels like to be divorced, at least once in my life.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  “I don’t want to anymore. You know the old saying about trying to seize opportunity by the forelock, after it’s fallen out.”

  “Yours hasn’t—you aren’t even gray yet.”

  “But yours has!”