Amazon.com Review
Although he was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize, Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) remains much more obscure in the West than his high-profile protégé
Yukio Mishima. Yet he's a writer of formidable talents. For one thing, Kawabata recognized early on the affinity between Japanese poetry--with its abrupt transition from image to image--and the jump-cut flavor of modernist prose. He also explored erotic life at a truly microcosmic level. Some may find a novel like
The Mole--which revolves around a woman's habit of fiddling with her eponymous birthmark--a little
too molecular in its approach. But sex, like God, is in the details, and throughout his career Kawabata has unearthed some surprising truths about our most urgent appetites.
First Snow on Fuji, a collection of stories originally published in 1958, is a fairly representative slice of the author's oeuvre. In "Her Husband Didn't" (a classic Kawabata title, by the way), a woman's earlobe becomes the discreet object of desire:
The earlobe was just as round and plump as an earlobe ought to be--it was small enough that Junji could squeeze it between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, no bigger than that--yet it filled him with a sense of the beauty of life. The smooth skin, the gentle swelling--the woman's earlobe was like a mysterious jewel.... He had never known anything with a texture like this. It was like touching the lovely girl's soul.
For Kawabata's characters, the physical usually leads straight to the metaphysical, which is what prevents him from deteriorating into a soft-core thrill merchant. And in several of the other stories here, he proceeds directly to the weightier issues. "Silence," for example, is at once a study in failing inspiration and a gloss on Kawabata's own career (the latter argument is made very effectively by translator Michael Emmerich in his introduction). And the title story offers an intriguing take on memory, which Kawabata seems to regard as a distinctly feminine operation: it's "the docility of women that makes it possible for them to return to the past."
What we love most in a writer--the idiosyncratic music of his or her prose--is the hardest thing for a translator to capture. There are times, alas, when Emmerich's ear seems inadequate to the task. His rendering never falls beneath a certain literate level--but for a writer of Kawabata's minimalistic delicacy, a clunky transition or flatfooted phrase can sink the whole enterprise. Readers might prefer to start, then, with Thousand Cranes or Snow Country. But for all its linguistic flaws, First Snow on Fuji reminds us that in literature most of all, less can be more--much more. --James Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
Marking the 100th anniversary of Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Kawabata's (Thousand Cranes) birth, this is the first English edition of these eight stories and one play, originally published in Japan in 1958. All are accomplished pieces written late in the author's career. In "This Country, That Country," a housewife named Takako hides a newspaper story on spouse-swapping, a subject of her fantasies, from her husband. The bond between desire and the act of hiding, the existential side of perversion, fascinates Kawabata. He composes his short fictions of seemingly disparate elements, leaving it to the reader to find the organic connection. On the way to visit a colleague and friend who can neither move nor speak after a stroke, the writer who narrates "Silence" hears from his taxi driver that the ghost of a beautiful woman has been appearing in cabs in the area. At the house of his friend, Omiya Akifusa, the narrator observes the strange attitude that Akifusa's daughter Tomiko has toward her bedridden fatherAa mixture of love and spite. With "the voice of a woman in hell," Tomiko reveals that she may write about her father's many affairs, and the appalled narrator, who feels that Akifusa is now "a sort of living ghost," believes that Tomiko may have been "possessed by something in him." The cab driver on the way back tells the narrator that he is sitting next to the female ghost, although he doesn't see her. This Jamesian interplay between the limits of perception and the insufficiency of action is further explored in "Her Husband Didn't." Outside the bounds of decorum, the story's adulterous lovers are still baffled by the incommunicability of desire. Junji's fetish for earlobes and his disappointment with Kiriko's ears throw the couple's entire relationship off balance. For readers who have never read Kawabata, these short stories are an excellent place to start. First serial ("Her Husband Didn't") to Tin House. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
