Plenty of Nothing

Kawabata on Set

Kawabata on location with Sayori Yoshinaga and the crew of The Izu Dancer (1963). From Mostly Portraits of Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972). His short story "Izu no Odoriko" has been filmed six times, according to IMDB, three times by Katsumi Nishikawa who directed this version.

Maekawa Sempan

Winter at Semi-Onsen, Yamagata (1949) by Maekawa Sempan. This print would make a good cover illustration for Kawabata's Snow Country.

Edward Gorey on Kawabata's Nobel

    I feel the Nobel Prize has for once been given to someone I think is a good writer; what can they be thinking of? Anyway, Connie and I were sitting at breakfast talking about Kawabata, whose name I can never remember, and usually recollect it as being Watanabe, whoever he may be, when the radio suddenly announced that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize; at first I thought it was some aberration of sound in my head. He was the one I was complaining to you that he was so little translated, which will now change as I expect at this very moment the minions of Alfred A. Knopf are arranging for a great pretentious Collected Works or the like, which in this case is fine by me. Connie filched my copies of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes to take to the Vineyard to reread, else I would have sent them to you, but I think they can still be come by -- Berkeley has them out in paperback.

Edward Gorey to Peter F. Neumeyer, October 18th, 1968. In Floating Worlds: Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, page 72. Somehow, Watanabe seems to be the default Japanese name when you can't think of the right one. Genshiken chapter 59:

Kawabata and Mishima Interviewed

In Japanese.

Cultural Differences

The morning of December 13, 1968, when Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata was in Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was awoken from his jetlagged slumber by a group of hotel employees celebrating the Feast of St Lucia. No doubt while they were thinking of this:

he was thinking of this:

(UPI photo. Carl Larsson, Morning Serenade for Prince Eugen in Sundborn. Koji Kumeta, Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, chapter 57.) About Ushi no Toki Mairi. About Lucia.

[Part 2: Reality check.

Edward Seidensticker writes about this incident in his memoir Tokyo Central (2002), page 202. One crucial difference is that Kawabata had been in Scandinavia for at least a week by St Lucia's Day, so goodbye jetlag. He writes, quoting from his own diary:

    On the next day, Friday the thirteenth, we had lunch at the Stockholm Opera House with the editor-in-chief of Bonniers, the most important Swedish publisher and also Kawabata's publisher. "The sun had come out and streamed through the southern windows, making the place seem like an orangerie, and Lucia of All Sweden came to greet us -- she was a robust blonde, said to be a swimming champion -- and I was happy." Lucia presides over the light festival at the dark time of the year, doubtless a pagan relic. Numbers of Lucias came into our several rooms at the Royal Hotel in the dead of night, their uniformly blonde hair crowned with a blaze of candles. There were photographers too. Photographs of me did not make the papers, but photographs of the Kawabatas, sitting up in bed and looking bemused, were everywhere.

Reality check on the reality check: they weren't all blonde.]

Keene, Chronicles of My Life

Two months after passing along the news that the Japan scholar Donald Keene is emigrating there at age 88 I came across a hardcover copy of his 2008 autobiography Chronicles of My Life: an American in the heart of Japan for $10 at Schooner Books, so I had to read it. It's a surprisingly plain and quick-paced account of his remarkable career as the preeminent herald of Japanese culture in the second half of the twentieth century, told without footnotes, and with a bit less poetic imagery than I would have expected. I think if I were his editor I would have encouraged him to quote more classical verse, or opera, or one of the many Japanese diaries he read as a naval interpreter during the war, and relate it to his own life, and perhaps imply a love affair with the moon as Yasunari Kawabata does in Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. As it is there is a layer of artistic interpretation in the dozen or so fanciful illustrations by Akira Yamaguchi that cluster toward the beginning of the book. The one above puts a storybook spin on Keene's account of a childhood trip to Europe in 1931. The kanji on the brass plaque of the French train window seem to say that although the autobiography is written in English, the story is ultimately Japanese. D

Japanese Word of the Day: Yukiguni

yukiguni, n. snow country

Yukiguni is the title of one of Kawabata's novels, translated as Snow Country in English.  The famous opening sentence is "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country."  The idea that a country can have snowy and non-snowy areas in close proximity is a bit foreign to Canadian thinking, where nearly everywhere is snowy all winter long.  There are moments of striking beauty in late autumn and early spring, when snow mixes with living green.  It's that overlap of seasons that gives the opening sentence its piquancy for me: not a sense of crossing a border but of inhabiting a mental state where warmth and cold are both present.  Douglas