Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

First published:Utsukushisa to kanashimi to, 1961-1963, serial; 1965, book (English translation, 1975)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1961

Locale: The cities of Kyoto and Kamakura, Japan

Principal Characters:

• Toshio Oki, a fifty-four-year-old novelist living in Kamakura
• Fumiko, Oki’s wife
• Taichiro, his son, a university professor specializing in traditional Japanese literature
• Otoko Ueno, a traditional Japanese painter living in Kyoto, who at the age of fifteen was Oki’s mistress
• Keiko Sakami, Otoko’s student, companion, and lover

The Novel

The action of Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness develops out of an affair that Toshio Oki had twenty-four years earlier with a fifteen-year-old girl named Otoko Ueno. The book begins with Oki’s decision to travel from his home in Kamakura, outside Tokyo, to Kyoto in order to surprise his former mistress, now a distinguished painter, with a request. Oki invites Otoko to listen to the tolling of Kyoto’s temple bells at midnight on New Year’s Eve. On the surface, Oki’s motives are superficial and sentimental. He finds himself intrigued by a glimpse of Otoko in photographs in a magazine article about her work; he wants to see if she has retained the innocent beauty of the fifteen-year-old whom he seduced and made pregnant. At the end of their affair, Otoko stayed in a mental hospital, after the death of her baby. Yet Otoko’s was not the only tragic loss resulting from the relationship. At the time, Oki was a married man with a young son; his wife, Fumiko, lost the baby she was carrying when the facts about her husband’s relationship with Otoko were revealed to her in the manuscript of the novel that Oki wrote about his young mistress.

Otoko finds this novel, which Oki has entitled A Girl of Sixteen, a curious document. While she recognizes his portrait of herself in the book, she does not find in it the mental anguish that she recalls as the most important characteristic of the affair. The novelist has softened and sentimentalized his account of their relationship; nevertheless, A Girl of Sixteen is his best, and most famous, book. When Oki telephones her from his hotel in Kyoto twenty-four years after their separation, Otoko decides to meet him to hear the temple bells, but she brings along her student, companion, and female lover, Keiko Sakami, to keep Oki from broaching the subject of the past. Keiko is only nineteen, but she knows of Otoko’s affair with Oki, both from his version of it in A Girl of Sixteen and from Otoko’s own account. Keiko is obsessed with understanding the bond between Oki and Otoko, and perhaps it is resentment and jealousy of the novelist’s continued ability to affect Otoko’s feelings that lead Keiko to mount a calculated assault upon the Oki family to extract what she calls revenge for Otoko’s suffering.

After Oki returns home to Kamakura, Keiko delivers to him two of her own paintings, pieces more abstract and expressionistic than the work of her teacher. Fumiko, sensing the threat that Keiko poses, is tempted to destroy these pictures. Oki himself, however, does not see any danger, and he even takes the risk of going to bed with Keiko. She refuses him her right breast, suggesting that it is deformed or unresponsive to stimulation, and at a crucial moment in their lovemaking, she calls out Otoko’s name and prevents Oki from achieving an orgasm.

Later, Keiko initiates a relationship with Oki’s son Taichiro, granting him her right breast but not her left; she maneuvers Oki’s son until she can telephone Fumiko with the claim that Taichiro has asked her to marry him. This telephone call comes from a hotel on the shore of Lake Biwa, just outside Kyoto, where Keiko has brought the young man so that they can take a moterboat out on the lake. There is a boating accident, perhaps planned by Keiko, and Taichiro is drowned. Otoko, Oki, and Fumiko meet in Keiko’s room at the hotel, confronting in the tragedy of Taichiro’s death the consequences of their own complex interrelationship. The beauty and sadness of Otoko’s memories take on, in the light of Keiko’s savage expression of resentment, a somberness not unlike the reaction of Fumiko, who accuses Otoko of engineering her son’s death as revenge for the death of the artist’s own baby daughter.

The Characters

The central figures of Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness are Fumiko, Otoko, and Keiko, three women who suffer and cause one another to suffer because of their involvement with Oki and his son Taichiro. In marked contrast to the masculine perspective articulated in Kawabata’s treatment of love in other novels, there is something surprisingly like a feminist viewpoint at work in this book. Of the three women, the most conventional is Fumiko. Devoted to family and home, she is the stereotypical middle-class housewife, and she struggles to control her feelings about her husband’s infidelity by committing herself even more to her role of wife and mother. As her husband’s typist, Fumiko sees it as a duty to prepare a neatly typed copy of A Girl of Sixteen for Oki’s publisher, even though the book makes it clear to her that her husband continues to love Otoko. At the end of Beauty and Sadness, Fumiko must live with her awareness that Oki’s passion for Otoko is as strong as ever. For her, the incursion of Keiko into the lives of her husband and son merely confirms the emotional pain she feels.

By contrast, Otoko manages to find a degree of emotional tranquillity because circumstances allow her to develop an insight into her own feelings and a degree of control, denied to Fumiko, over her own behavior. The significant difference between the two women is that subsequent to her hospitalization Otoko becomes an artist and finds that she is able to channel her emotions into her painting. Largely unconscious of what she is doing, until Keiko joins her as a student, Otoko then develops the ability to recognize the self-deception in her work. She sees that even a portrait of her own mother is largely an idealized picture of herself as victim, and as her relationship with Keiko becomes overtly sexual, Otoko recognizes that in her treatment of Keiko she is repeating Oki’s unconscious manipulation of her younger self. As she plans to paint Keiko in the guise of a Buddhist saint, a design stressing the girl’s androgyny, Otoko uses her art to seek moral insight.

Kawabata leaves unresolved the question of whether Keiko is more than a projection of Otoko’s subconscious desire for revenge on Oki. Keiko’s volatile emotions are clear enough, even before Oki and his son come back into Otoko’s life; so is her devotion to her teacher. There is a level on which she represents the elemental passions which Otoko and Fumiko control and fail to acknowledge, and it is tempting to see the three as the Freudian id, superego, and ego. Such a reading, however, would obscure the specific Buddhist context in which Kawabata places all three women, with the implication that Keiko is a tortured soul striving to achieve spiritual transcendence. She tells Taichiro, having brought him to the hotel at Lake Biwa and gone to bed with him for the first (and only) time, that she feels reborn. Kawabata deliberately leaves unclear whether Keiko’s words refer to her emotions after intercourse or to her satisfaction in bringing Taichiro to the point of sacrifice.

Critical Context

Beauty and Sadness focuses on the thoughts and feelings of female characters, not those of males as in Kawabata’s Yukiguni ( 1947; Snow Country, 1956), Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes, 1958), or Nemureru bijo (1961; The House of the Sleeping Beauties, 1969). Both the novelist Oki and his son Taichiro are peripheral to Kawabata’s focus on the effects of creative, self-sufficient women’s passion. Nevertheless, Oki and his son are typical of the men at the centers of other of his novels. They are attracted to women, drawn most strongly by the prospect of sexual innocence, but are incapable of relating to women on a level beyond the sexual.

It is Kawabata’s characterization of Fumiko, Otoko, and Keiko that makes Beauty and Sadness unique among his novels. Because he portrays them from the inside and not through the eyes of a male protagonist as he does in other books, these three characters have a vitality and an integrity that his women often do not. In addition, Otoko and Keiko are shown as artists engaged in the kind of creativity often assumed to be a male prerogative. They are not the musicians, dancers, and practitioners of the tea ceremony found in Kawabata’s other novels, women devoted to arts that are merely re-creative of the primary activity of composer, dance teacher, or tea master. Keiko and Otoko grapple with the primary materials of their art; they embody in their paintings a way of seeing the world, as Oki does in his novels. Based on the evidence of A Girl of Sixteen and the paintings done by the two women, it is clear that Oki is inferior as an artist to Otoko and Keiko.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, 1984.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1980.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.