B383-BP2
Review of Yasunari
Kawabata’s Palm Of The Hand Stories
Copyright © by Brent Peterson, 5/29/06
'Affectless' prose is an interesting thing. Despite its supposed merits
of subtlety and concision through absence of emphasis, it isn't always the case
that 'spare' prose results in anything more believable or affecting than more
ornate writing. Indeed, the reverse is often the case. Supposedly minimalist,
understated lines become monumental and bloated by dint of their sheer
purposefulness; the affected intention shines through the alleged clarity. Think
of many Bukowski poems, where every line slams home with a clunk; or the
ponderous thud of Hemingway's 'simple' sentences.
One of the few writers I've seen make understatement work is the Japanese
Modernist and Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata; and Kawabata does things
with understatement that I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't chanced to
pick up his Beauty and Sadness a few years ago. That book is certainly 'affectless'
- as much descriptive weight is accorded to the deaths of major characters as it
is to what their family members have for breakfast. But what saves Kawabata from
clunkiness is a fine eye for detail: he has an Impressionist's command of light
and color paired with a Modernist's appreciation for the strange, for the union
of seeming incongruities. In short, he writes narrative haiku - and if that
sounds precious, it should be remembered that his stories and novels are devoid
of both sentimentality and bitterness.
Palm of the Hand Stories, translated
by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, contains 70 stories in 240 pages. Most are
no more than 3 pages; the longest is 11. And yet, these are not jokes,
incidents, vignettes, or even sketches: they're full-blooded short stories, just
small. They're like ships in bottles where, if you look closely enough,
you can see a tiny sailor polishing the deck through the surface sheen of the
glass. Even as a young writer (he claimed to have written these stories in his
youth instead of poetry) Kawabata seems to have had a perfect command for the
right details to include - rather than bludgeoning the reader with extended
paragraphs, he fixates on single, telling perceptions. He even condenses his
entire novel Snow Country into a palm-of-the-hand story, 200+ pages cut
down to 11, without any real loss. You get the feeling that the reverse would be
just as feasible: many of these stories could easily be expanded into novels.
They're like fictional fractals: zooming in or out only reveals finer points of
the construction, possibilities both explored and dormant.
The stories 'The White Flower' and 'Glass' are some of the most
emotionally complex pieces of short fiction I've ever read, and neither of them
is more than three pages. In the former, a pale, sickly girl, possibly
tuburcular, is sent to a sanatorium for her illness. While there, after her
rehabilitation, the young doctor attending her confesses his love for her,
claiming that if medicine weren't his calling from heaven, "my emotions
would have killed you by now." The girl leaves the doctor for a novelist,
who wants to 'sketch her soul in words'. But this conventionally romantic
sentiment alienates the girl further, and he admits that "If I weren't a
novelist, my emotions could not have let you live into the distant future."
The story ends with the girl sitting alone in her room after the death of her
cousin, reflecting on the word "pink" which both the doctor and the
novelist used when discussing their love for her. The girl seems at ease, and
the story ends with her smiling. There is a suggestion of incest with the dead
cousin, but nothing explicit. Subtly, the story makes much of the interplay of
pink/white and the perversity of the frail girl who wishes for a strong man's
arms to "make her ribs crack."
'Glass' concerns a husband and wife who learn the details of a young boy
the girl once cared for. When they were younger, the boy worked in a hellish
glass factory, and was injured by a ball of hot glass striking his shoulder. The
wife, a girl at the time, visited the boy in the hospital and gave him money.
Ten years later, the husband reads a story in a magazine and learns that the boy
has become a writer and written a story, 'Glass', describing his encounter with
the girl, Yoko, now the husband's wife. In the story, the boy explains how he
got a job making flower vases, and sent the most beautiful one to Yoko as a
present. At the same time, the boy resents 'the blessing of a haunting enemy',
realizing the social gap that separated him from the bourgeois Yoko. The boy
fantasizes about burning down their house, and imagines Yoko's beauty destroyed
along with the vase. At the conclusion of the story, Yoko wonders out loud where
the vase went, and the husband thinks that "He had never seen such a meek
face on his wife." Yoko's possible involvement with the boy is smoothed
over as the husband gives a pious homily, pointing out, as he sees it, the
futility of class warfare. The surface awkwardness between husband and wife is
resolved, but the status quo is not restored:
"But this was odd. The man had never once in all these years felt
the loveliness and freshness in his wife that he perceived in the girl in the
story. How could that bent-backed, pale, sickly urchin have this kind of
power?"
In just two lines, Kawabata shifts emphasis from the husband's suspicion
and jealousy to a new realization: the power of the written word to transform
perception. These reversals are common: you could think of them as plot twists,
except that they twist expectation rather than a direct line of external action.
Kawabata referred to some of these stories as 'unnecessarily contrived.'
But, to my mind, that sounds less like self-criticism than a challenge, a
personal bet to see if a two-page story can be anything other than a potted
observation or brief glimmer. There's a nice audacity in having 3-page stories
with convoluted plots. This, for example, is the opening paragraph of 'God's
Bones':
"Mr. Kasahara Seiichi, managing director of a suburban trolley car
company; Takamura Tokijuro, actor in historical movies; Tsujii Morio, medical
student at a private university; and Mr. Sakuma Benji, owner of the Canton
restaurant - each had received the same letter from Yumiko, a waitress at the
Blue Heron coffee shop."
Now, keeping that info-dense, potboileresque setup in mind, consider that
the entire length of this story is two pages. And yet, it's one of the
best ones here, a consideration of loss, responsibility, and nothingness.
Yumiko, the waitress, becomes pregnant and miscarries. Not certain which of the
four men is the father, Yumiko sends them all a portion of the child's ashes,
claiming they are "the bones of God," construing the facelessness of
the child as a purposeful imitation of divinity. The story recounts how each of
the fathers discounts the bones. Only the managing director visits Yumiko, and
the story ends with him asking her to bury the ashes at a temple rather than
holding onto them. Yumiko is confused, and states that she has given all the
bones away. This last line does not 'resolve' anything (although Seichii's
questioning underpins the hypocrisy of the waitress continuing to hold onto and
venerate the child she claimed to have given away) but it conveys the moral
uncertainty of the story.
"Thunder in Autumn" tells the story of a town's legend of a boy
whose mother feared thunder. After the mother died, the boy ran to the cemetery
to embrace her gravestone whenever thunder sounded. Eventually the boy was
struck by lightning and charred, and the boy's example of filial piety led the
townspeople to feed portions of his ashes to their children in the hopes of the
value being passed down. The story picks up as a young man from the village
considers the position of his new wife:
"In our new home outside the city, four crickets jumped out from
behind my bride's new bureau. The white coverlet had not yet been removed. My
new bride had the early summer brilliance of a bouquet of lilacs. Then, once
again, the thunder cracked as if the summer would destroy itself. As I held my
cowering little bride, what I first felt through her skin was something within
her that was a mother. Who could not say I would not become a charred corpse
when I embraced this warm, soft tombstone?"
Every story has a passage like this, a moment of counterintuitive
intensity. Reading Palm of the Hand Stories is like listening to an album
where, instead of the songs' verse/chorus structures repeating themselves into
tedium, every track is the peak of each song's intensity and nothing more. There
are a million ways many of these stories could have ended up contrived or
gimmicky, but Kawabata always finds a small kernel of human behavior to underpin
everything; these are always people, never puppets jerked in service of a
conceit. Throughout the 70 stories, Kawabata's characters become recognizable -
he's fond of sad girls, old men, dilettantes and the blind - but never
stereotyped, and often unpredictable. Even when stories like "Bamboo Leaf
Boats" (which concerns a crippled girl waiting for her fiancé to return
from World War II) seem to risk the maudlin, Kawabata cuts away from any
melodrama. Where a lesser writer would end this and similar stories with a
flourish or lament, Kawabata's endings sometimes seem arbitrary or neutral. Some
of the stories, indeed, (many of the dream stories) seem like non-sequiturs at
first – and it's easy to see how a cursory reading would dismiss them as
trifles. But Kawabata is not being random; even in the stories without tight
plots, there is always an order to the proceedings, a thematic connective
tissue. Kawabata is very good at evoking the ways in which the mind processes
metaphor and memory - in "Tabi", for example, the whiteness of a
roundworm crawling from a dead girl is linked in the narrator's mind to the
whiteness of her school socks; and this is later connected to a dead teacher the
girl fell in love with. These kind of connections seem much closer to actual
mental processes than the unpunctuated 'stream-of-consciousness' writing of
Kawabata's contemporaries, and feel much less forced. Kawabata loves
synaesthetic metaphors, and often relies on the combination of contradictory
terms: conventionally ugly things become beautiful, and vice versa. In the story
'Autumn Rain', a dream of 'fire falling on mountains red with autumn leaves' is
connected to the narrator's observation of drops of rain streaking across a
train window. As the narrator explains:
"My vision of the fire falling on the autumn mountains had been
entirely soundless, but I imagined that it was the music of the drops that
struck the glass and flowed along that had become my vision of falling
fire."
The condensed version of Snow Country displays similar techniques:
the opening scene – made famous by the novel – features the extended play of
a girl's reflection in the frosted-over mirror of a train window (much is made
of the overlapping of visual planes and the diffraction of light); and later on
there are a woman's 'small, budlike lips' compared to 'a beautiful circle of
leeches'; the 'sweet, rounded sound' of flowing water in a stream (which
predates Nabokov's famous 'square echo' of a car door); and, at the end, a
second scene of reflection, with the geisha heroine's 'purple-black' hair
outlined against a reflection of 'burning snow' in a mirror. Considering how
well this poetry comes through, even in translation, it's easy to imagine why
Kawabata is considered nigh-untouchable in Japanese literary circles, and a
continuation of the haiku tradition of brief and surprising observation.
