This collection of stories, plus an essay and a dance-drama, was originally published in 1958 as "Fuji no Hatsuyuki." It is late Kawabata -- most of the major works had already appeared, the author wrote much less during these years, and he died in 1972.
That these works form a meditation on death is not surprising. Many of Kawabata's works -- early and late -- are just that. He called himself a master of ceremonies at funerals, and though he was referring to duties at the demise of friends, his writing was from the earliest informed by thoughts of death.
Indeed, this awareness of transience creates the Kawabata tone. In a way it makes him "Japanese," because these people are traditionally less inclined to deny the facts of life (and death) than are those of at least several other countries. It also makes him universal, because these are facts that, like it or not, we must all face.
This lends Kawabata's work a certain cohesion -- this and the facts that he often finished works long after they were originally published, and that all of his writing shares a relatively narrow repertoire of themes.
Readers of a work as early as "The Diary of My Sixteenth Year" will find that one of the stories here, "Nature," might be considered a continuation. The story "Yumiura" could be seen as a late metamorphosis of "The Izu Dancer." Indeed, one Japanese critic saw it as that, stating that the aged woman turning up at the novelist's door is really the child dancer now grown old. In any event, Kawabata included both works in a collection of his favorites published shortly before he received the Nobel Prize.
A theme that is often found in Kawabata's works (as well as in the writings of many other authors) is the nature of self-awareness. The woman in "This County, That County" is surprised to discover that two entities can express themselves through her; the man in "Nature" has lived a life as a woman and Kawabata is very interested in what Thomas Rimer has called "the interplay between character, gender and self-knowledge."
In "Silence," the author visits another writer, victim of a stroke, who can no longer speak and seems "a living ghost." Interwoven into this is a "real" ghost story, one side of the theme lending body to the other. The essay "Chrysanthemum in the Rock" contains its own ghost, since the rock is eventually a grave stone and the various themes of awareness, ghosts and death are all gracefully gathered together.
Kawabata's means are famously economical. Indeed, perhaps the only way to treat the great truths he deals with is through a style this laconic. Through ellipses, thrown-away observations and intimations, Kawabata is able to suggest his meaning without explicitly stating it. One must infer when reading Kawabata, and this modest exercise means that one brings to him what is necessary for his intentions to flower.
The sense of death that hovers just about the Kawabata page would, indeed, be impossible were it directly delineated. Rather, author and reader together weave the pattern. Translating this into another language is a problem. This work has been translated into German and Russian, and I can have no opinion as to their success.
In English, Kawabata is fortunate in having had good translators -- Edward Seidensticker, Howard Hibbett and now Michael Emmerich.
This sense of evanescence that is so palpable in Kawabata is what, I believe, links him so strongly to his country and its culture, and what makes him at the same time so universal. He wrote about the most important subject and his words directly reach us. After his suicide, no note was found, but one obituary remembered something he had said: "A silent death is an endless word."
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.