A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 1971, 204 p. Translated from the Japanese 雪国 (Yukinugi) and 雪国 (Senbazuru) by Edward G Seidenstecker. First published in English in 1956 and 1958, respectively.

This book contains two of the author’s novels, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. Kawabata is also known as a poet and some of his sentences here are short and enigmatic, as in haiku. The nuances of Japanese culture can perhaps never be properly illuminated by a translation; there is though something ineluctably Japanese about the two tales – at least to someone brought up with no contact with the country – a sort of understanding not fully expressed by the prose.

Snow Country is the story of the relationship between Shimamura, who goes on a trip from the city to the hot springs of the snow country of Western Japan, and Komako, a local part-time geisha. On the train there Shimamura observes the ministrations of a young woman named Yoko to a young man who is obviously ill, returning to his home to die. Yoko is an off-screen presence for most of the novel, though her importance to Shimamura, perhaps as some sort of ideal, is not in doubt. It is his dealings with Komako that take up most of the story though, a liaison never completely spelled out but indicated by implication, yet most likely utterly transparent to a Japanese reader.

Thousand Cranes is a bit more straightforward. As a boy, Kikuji was once brought by his father to a meeting with his mistress, Chikako, when he glimpsed the birthmark on her left breast. Years later, after his father’s death, his mother also being dead, Chikako unwarrantedly assumes loco parentis and tries to inveigle him into marrying Yokiko Inamura, who on introduction to him wore a dress decorated with pictures of cranes. He is not interested. Instead, he becomes briefly involved with Mrs Ota, who had replaced Chikako as his father’s mistress, and friendly with her daughter Fumiko. A lot of their interactions are mediated through the rituals of the tea ceremony and of gifts and usage of various kinds of Japanese pottery.

These two short novels were interesting reading, if a little opaque to my anglophone sensibilities.

Despite this being in translation (albeit into USian) amazingly I found not a single typo or any other possible entrant for Pedant’s corner in this book.