Written on the Edge of the World: Yasunari Kawabata
‘At the end of the long tunnel across the border was the Snow Country.’ This is the opening line of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, a text which is so deeply entrenched in the consciousness and culture of Japanese people, yet remains largely obscure to English readers.
The current English literary market leaves no doubt in proclaiming Haruki Murakami as the essential and quintessential Japanese writer. His magical realism style speaks to Western readers with its emphasis on urbanity and (post-)modernity. However, as one digs a little deeper, one can excavate a set of deeply traditional Japanese philosophies which govern Murakami’s work. These philosophies which he inherits from his predecessors, are, debatably, more purely and momentously demonstrated in the works of Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Buddhist philosophy of Zen coupled with a suppressed lust for beauty permeates through his writing.
Kawabata’s writing style reflects his life and time. Born in 1899 (Meiji 32) and dying by suicide in 1972 (Showa 49), Kawabata witnessed the reign of three Tennos, the two World Wars, the devastating suicide of his apprentice/friend Yukio Mishima, and the untimely death of his parents when he was four. Uncontrollable forces like these made him extraordinarily sensitive to the ambivalent natures of life and death; creation and destruction; existence and nonexistence.
Still waters run deep as Kawabata weaves complex nets of conflicting emotions. Yet Kawabata is also very careful to avoid directly indicating them. Kawabata provides us with a bird’s-eye view of the world; he sends us on a stargazing search for the intangible and the transcendental. Words such as ‘blissful’ and ‘melancholy’ would at most appear in the title of his work. Instead, with aloofness, Kawabata sets emotions on free collision courses. Emotional intensity culminates in the drop of the last lines, which are like weightless pebbles splashing into a tranquil pond, sending unstoppable ripples—a quiet entropy—across the disturbed water surface. This abstract, minimalist approach prompts readers to give up thinking and feel their own emotions, resonating with the characters. Serendipitously, readers might uncover the emotional richness hidden beneath the rippling water’s surface - beneath their own consciousness. This is demonstrated in the ending paragraph of The Dancing Girl of Izu. It is ambiguous yet perfectly summed up by the ambivalent emotions brooding in the protagonist after parting with the dancing girl, signalling the end to their fruitless early love: ‘I let my tears flow free. My head became clear as water, trickling away. And at last, a sweet bliss, as if nothing would remain.’
Critics have pointed out that the characters in Kawabata’s writing are merely archetypes representative of human complexity. As we read about these characters who hover between reality and fiction, they manifest as phantoms of our consciousness. We are, in a sense, aggregates of these ambiguous archetypes. In the short story Gashho, Kawabata writes about a man who has a habit of clasping his hand—a Buddhist ritual commonly associated with praying for the dead—whenever he feels apprehensive. He finds peace through the ritual, even feeling that ‘his soul is sanctified’. Kawabata never flinches to reassure us that, for the earthly beings that we are, tormented by the impermanence of life, we ourselves can evince a cardinal sanctity—a Buddhist epiphany that peace can transcend pain and suffering.
In this age of information, where the Internet has sometimes become an expedient to seek pleasure and relief, mindfulness has emerged to resist the ever-quickening pace of the world. Mindfulness can be seen as an intrinsic state of emptiness. Empty so that we become containers and absorbers of what we observe; empty of preconceptions so that we realise the miraculous duality of us being individuals and being parts of a greater, beautiful world. We look for salvation in art and fiction, as if there is a better version—a lost fragment of our broken selves - abandoned between the lines for us to regain. Perhaps the writing of Kawabata is the art and fiction we need to become mindful. Unlike self-help books which provide readers with the hardware and practices, Kawabata’s books re-instil in readers a now increasingly recessive sensitivity to the external physical world, which reflects our internal spirituality. His books send readers on ambiguous, map-less journeys into uncertain regions where our true selves slumber.
When the Western canon loses its shine, go and look for Kawabata’s works written on the other border of the globe. And, holding in your hand the ticket to the East, you board the train, which brings you, through the long and dark tunnel, to the Snow Country melting on the edge of your consciousness.