Beauty and Sadness Read online

  YASUNARI KAWABATA

  BEAUTY AND SADNESS

  Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists. Born in Osaka in 1899, he published his first stories while he was still in high school. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Among his major novels published in the United States are Snow Country (1956), Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1970), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, in 1972.

  Also by

  YASUNARI KAWABATA

  Snow Country

  Thousand Cranes

  The Sound of the Mountain

  The Master of Go

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1996

  Copyright © 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Japan in hardcover as Utsukushisa To Kanashimi To by Chuo koronsha, Tokyo.

  Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by Yasunari Kawabata. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1975.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Kawabata, Yasunari, Date.

  Beauty and sadness.

  Translation of Utsukushisa to kanashimi to.

  I. Title.

  PZ3.K1775Be3 [P1.832.A9] 895.6′3′4 74-21281

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83363-1

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Temple Bells

  Early Spring

  The Festival of the Full Moon

  A Rainy Sky

  A Stone Garden

  The Lotus in the Flames

  Strands of Black Hair

  Summer Losses

  The Lake

  About the Translator

  TEMPLE BELLS

  Five swivel chairs were ranged along the other side of the observation car of the Kyoto express. Oki Toshio noticed that the one on the end was quietly revolving with the movement of the train. He could not take his eyes from it. The low armchairs on his side of the car did not swivel.

  Oki was alone in the observation car. Slouched deep in his armchair, he watched the end chair turn. Not that it kept turning in the same direction, at the same speed: sometimes it went a little faster, or a little slower, or even stopped and began turning in the opposite direction. To look at that one revolving chair, wheeling before him in the empty car, made him feel lonely. Thoughts of the past began flickering through his mind.

  It was the twenty-ninth of December. Oki was going to Kyoto to hear the New Year’s Eve bells.

  For how many years had he heard the tolling of those bells over the radio? How long ago had the broadcasts begun? Probably he had listened to them every year since then, and to the commentary by various announcers, as they picked up the sound of famous old bells from temples all around the country. During the broadcast the old year was giving way to the new, so the commentaries tended to be florid and emotional. The deep booming note of a huge Buddhist temple bell resounded at leisurely intervals, and the lingering reverberations held an awareness of the old Japan and of the flow of time. After the bells of the northern temples came the bells in Kyushu, but every New Year’s Eve ended with the Kyoto bells. Kyoto had so many temples that sometimes the mingled sounds of a host of different bells came over the radio.

  At midnight his wife and daughter might still be bustling about, preparing holiday delicacies in the kitchen, straightening up the house, or perhaps getting their kimonos ready or arranging flowers. Oki would sit in the dining room and listen to the radio. As the bells rang he would look back at the departing year. He always found it a moving experience. Some years that emotion was violent or painful. Sometimes he was racked by sorrow and regret. Even when the sentimentality of the announcers repelled him, the tolling of the bells echoed in his heart. For a long time he had been tempted by the thought of being in Kyoto one New Year’s Eve to hear the living sound of those old temple bells.

  That had come to mind again this year end, and he had impulsively decided to go to Kyoto. He had also been stirred by a defiant wish to see Ueno Otoko again after all these years, and to listen to the bells with her. Otoko had not written to him since she had moved to Kyoto, but by now she had established herself there as a painter in the classical Japanese tradition. She was still unmarried.

  Because it was on impulse, and he disliked making reservations, Oki had simply gone to Yokohama Station and boarded the observation car of the Kyoto express. Near the holidays the train might be crowded, but he knew the porter and counted on getting a seat from him.

  Oki found the Kyoto express convenient, since it left Tokyo and Yokohama early in the afternoon, arriving at Kyoto in the evening, and also left in early afternoon on its way back. He always made his trips to Kyoto on this train. Most of the girl attendants in the first-class cars knew him by sight.

  Once aboard, he was surprised to find the car empty. Perhaps there were never many passengers on the twenty-ninth of December. It might be crowded again by the thirty-first.

  As he kept watching the end chair turn, Oki began to think of fate. Just then the porter brought tea.

  “Am I all alone?” Oki asked.

  “Only five or six passengers today, sir.”

  “Will it be full on New Year’s Day?”

  “No, sir, it usually isn’t. Is that when you’re coming back?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I won’t be on duty myself, but I’ll see that you’re taken care of.”

  “Thank you.”

  After the porter left, Oki looked around the car and saw a pair of white leather valises at the foot of the last armchair. They were square and rather slender, in a new style. The white leather was flecked with pale brownish dots; it was a kind unobtainable in Japan. Also, there was a large leopard-skin handbag on the chair. The owners of the luggage must be Americans. Probably they were in the dining car.

  Woods flowed by in a thick, warm-looking haze outside the window. Far above the haze, white clouds were bathed in a shimmering light that seemed to radiate up from the earth. But as the train went on, the whole sky cleared. The sunlight slanting in the windows reached all across the car. As they passed a pine-covered mountain he could see that the ground was strewn with dry pine needles. A clump of bamboo had yellowed leaves. On the ocean side sparkling waves surged in to shore against a black cape.

  Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it.

  The winter day was already ending. Oki let his eyes follow the dull silver-gray line of a river, and then looked up into the setting sun. For a long while the last bright chilly rays streamed through an arc-shaped cleft in the black clouds, before disappearing. The lights were on in the car, and suddenly all the swivel chairs wheeled halfway around. But only the one on the end kept turning.

  When he arrived in Kyoto, Oki went directly to the Miyako Hotel. He asked for a quiet room, with the thought that Otoko might come to see him. The elevator seemed to rise six or seven floors; but since the hotel was built in st
eps upward along a steep slope of the Eastern Hills, the long corridor he followed led back to a ground-floor wing. The rooms along the corridor were as silent as if there were no other guests. A little after ten o’clock he began hearing clamorous foreign voices all around him. Oki asked the floor boy about it.

  There were two families, he was told, with twelve children between them. The children not only shouted at each other within their rooms but romped up and down the corridor. Why, when the hotel seemed almost empty, had they sandwiched him in between such noisy guests? Oki restrained his annoyance, thinking the children would soon go to sleep. But the noise went on and on, perhaps because they were keyed up by the trip. What especially grated on his ears was the sound of their footsteps running along the corridor. Finally he got out of bed.

  The loud chattering in a foreign language made Oki feel all the more lonely. That revolving chair in the observation car, turning by itself, came before him. It was as if he saw his own loneliness silently turning round and round within his heart.

  Oki had come to Kyoto to hear the New Year’s Eve bells and to see Ueno Otoko, but he wondered once again which had been his real reason. Of course he was not sure he could see her. Yet were not the bells merely a pretext, and the chance of seeing her something he had long desired? He had come to Kyoto hoping to listen to the temple bells with Otoko. It had seemed a not unreasonable hope. But a gulf of many years lay between them. Though she had remained unmarried, it was quite possible that she would refuse to see an old lover, to accept an invitation from him.

  “No, she’s not like that,” Oki muttered to himself. Still, he did not know how she might have changed.

  It seemed that Otoko was living in a guest house on the grounds of a certain temple, along with a girl who was her protégée. Oki had come across a photograph of her in an art magazine. It was not a cottage, but a sizable house, with a large sitting room that she used as a studio. There was even a fine old garden. The photograph showed Otoko with brush in hand, bending over to work on a painting, but the line of her profile was unmistakable. Her figure was as slender as ever. Even before his old memories were awakened, he felt a stab of guilt at having robbed her of the possibility of marriage and motherhood. Obviously no one else would feel as he did about that photograph. To people who glanced at it in the magazine it would be merely the portrait of a woman artist who had gone to live in Kyoto and had become a typical Kyoto beauty.

  Oki had thought he would telephone her the next day, if not that night, or drop in at her house. But in the morning, after being awakened by his neighbors’ children, he began to feel hesitant, and decided to send her a special-delivery letter. As he sat at the writing desk staring perplexedly at a blank sheet of hotel stationery he decided that he need not see her, that it would be enough to hear the bells alone and then go back.

  Oki had been aroused early by the children, but once the two foreign families went out he fell asleep again. It was almost eleven when he awakened.

  Slowly tying his necktie, he suddenly recalled Otoko saying: “I’ll tie it for you. Let me.…” She was fifteen, and those had been her first words after he had taken her virginity. Oki himself had not spoken. There was nothing he could say. He had been holding her tenderly close, stroking her hair, but he could not bring himself to speak. Then she had slipped out of his arms and begun to dress. He got up, put on his shirt, and started to tie his tie. She was looking up into his face, her eyes moist and shining, but not tearful. He avoided those eyes. Even when he had kissed her, earlier, Otoko had kept her eyes wide open until he pressed them shut with his lips.

  There was a sweet, girlish ring in her voice as she asked to tie his tie. Oki felt a wave of relief. What she said was completely unexpected. Perhaps she was trying to escape from herself, rather than to indicate forgiveness, but she handled his necktie gently, though she seemed to be having trouble with it.

  “Do you know how?” Oki asked.

  “I think so. I used to watch my father.”

  Her father had died when Otoko was eleven.

  Oki dropped into a chair and held Otoko facing him on his lap, lifting his chin to make it easier for her. She crouched slightly toward him, several times undoing the tie and beginning over again. Then she slipped off his lap, trailing her fingers along his right shoulder, and gazed at the necktie. “There you are, Sonny-boy. Will that do?” Oki got up and went to the mirror. The knot was perfect. He rubbed the palm of his hand roughly across his face, with its faint oily film of sweat. He could hardly look at himself after having violated such a young girl. In the mirror he saw her face approaching. Startled by its fresh, poignant beauty, Oki turned round to her. She touched his shoulder, nestled her face against his chest, and said: “I love you.”

  It had also seemed strange that a fifteen-year-old girl should call a man twice her age “Sonny-boy.”

  That was twenty-four years ago. Now he was fifty-four. Otoko must be thirty-nine.

  After his bath Oki had switched on the radio and learned that Kyoto had had a light freeze. The forecast said that the mild winter would probably continue over the holidays.

  Oki breakfasted on toast and coffee in his room, and arranged to hire a car. Unable to make up his mind to call on Otoko, he decided to have the driver take him out to Mt. Arashi. From the car window he saw that the familiar, softly rounded low hills to the north and west, though some of them were in feeble sunlight, had the chilly drabness of a Kyoto winter. It looked as if the day were already ending. Oki got out of the car just before the Togetsu Bridge, but instead of crossing it walked up the road along the river toward Kameyama Park.

  At the end of the year even Mt. Arashi, so alive with tourists from spring till fall, had become a deserted landscape. The ancient mountain lay there before him, utterly still. The deep pool of the river at its base was a limpid green. In the distance echoed the sound of logs being loaded onto trucks from rafts along the bank. The mountainside descending to the river was the famous view, he supposed, but now it was in shadow except for a band of sunlight over the shoulder of Mt. Arashi that sloped toward the upper reaches of the river.

  Oki had intended to have a quiet lunch by himself near Mt. Arashi. He had visited two restaurants there before. One of them was not far from the bridge, but its gate was closed. It seemed unlikely that people would come all the way out to this lonely mountain at the end of the year. Oki walked on along the river at a leisurely pace, wondering if the little rustic restaurant upstream would also be closed. He could always go back to the city for lunch. When he climbed the worn stone steps up to the restaurant, a girl turned him away, saying everyone had gone to Kyoto. How many years ago had it been, in the season for bamboo shoots, that he ate those young shoots in bonito broth here? He went back down to the road, and noticed an old woman sweeping leaves from a flight of low stone steps that led up to another restaurant next door. He asked if it was open, and she told him she thought so. Oki paused beside her for a moment, remarking how quiet it was. “Yes, you can hear people talking all the way across the river,” she said.

  The restaurant, buried in a hillside grove, had a thick, damp-looking old thatched roof and a dark entryway. One would hardly take it for a restaurant. In front, a stand of bamboo pressed in on it. The trunks of four or five splendid red pines towered beyond the thatched roof. Oki was shown into a private room, but there seemed to be no one else around. Just outside the glass sliding doors were red aoki berries. He saw a single azalea flower blooming out of season. Aoki shrubs and bamboos and the red pines blocked his view, but through the leaves he could glimpse a deep, clear jade-green pool in the river. All of Mt. Arashi was as still as that pool of water.

  Oki sat at the kotatsu, both elbows propped on the low quilt-covered table over a warm charcoal brazier. He could hear a bird singing. The sound of logs being loaded on trucks echoed through the valley. From somewhere off in the Western Hills came the plaintive, lingering whistle of a train entering or leaving a tunnel. He was reminded of the thin
cry of a newborn baby.… At sixteen, in the seventh month of carrying his child, Otoko had given birth. The baby was a girl.

  Nothing could be done to save it, and Otoko never saw the baby. When it died, the doctor advised against letting her know too soon.

  “Mr. Oki, I want you to tell her,” Otoko’s mother had said. “I’m apt to burst out crying, the poor thing having to go through all this, when she’s still such a child.”

  For the time being Otoko’s mother had suppressed her anger and resentment toward him. Her daughter was all she had, and once her daughter was pregnant, even by a man with a wife and child of his own, she no longer dared revile him. Her spirit failed, though it had seemed even stronger than Otoko’s. She had to rely on Oki to see that the child was born in secret, and to arrange for its care afterward. Then too, Otoko, nervous and high-strung in pregnancy, had threatened to kill herself if her mother criticized him.

  When he came back to her bedside, Otoko looked at him with the gentle eyes, drained of feeling, of a newly delivered mother. But soon tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. She must have guessed, Oki thought. The tears flowed uncontrollably. As one of the streams went toward her ear, he hastily dabbed at it. She grasped his hand, and for the first time broke into audible sobs. She wept and sobbed as if a dam had burst.

  “It’s dead, isn’t it? The baby’s dead, it’s dead!”

  She was writhing in anguish, and Oki held her tight, pinning her body down. He could feel one of her small, youthful breasts—small, but swollen with milk—against his arm.

  Her mother came in and called to Otoko. Perhaps she had been just outside.

  Oki kept his arms around her.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said. “Let me go.”

  “Will you lie still? You won’t move?”

  “I’ll lie still.”

  He released her, and her shoulders sagged. New tears began to seep through her closed eyelids.

  “Mother, are you going to cremate it?”