Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata Search Amazon for other books by or about Yasunari Kawabata. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

A man with a young wife embarks on an affair with a beautiful 15-yeard old girl. The girl undergoes an abortion that ruins her life and the man writes a book about the experience that supports him and his family for many years to come. This is the basis for Yasunari Kawabata's wonderful novel about madness and propriety in modernizing Japanese society. The girl grows into an artist and takes a younger apprentice and their acts, especially those of young Keiko, are the dynamic forces behind the narrative. The other characters are more acted upon than actors, which is nicely brought out by the framing concept of painting. Kawabata relates the characters of the two female artists both through the styles in which they paint and through comparisons with the past. As ever in his work (and indeed very commonly in much of Japanese literature), there is always a strong sense that the shadow of the past overlays the present and cannot be escaped. That does not, of course, mean that this shadow is either benign or malevolent in nature but it does mean it is difficult to avoid. The first young girl, Otoko, is trapped both by the circumstances in which she was more or less obliged to enter into the relationship she did with the older man (her father was absent and money would have been short) and by the way her environment has shaped her own character. This is indicated, subtly, by her future actions and productions.

At the same time, Keiko's future may seem to be presaged by the almost abstract nature of her painting, which suggests sensibility rushing out of control. However, the denouement of her behaviour is as shocking as that of any female character I have come across since reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar many years ago. That is, the action results from her character and its interaction with the world around her and her relationships with the people in it. Yet the reader can scarcely imagine the outcome of this, however logical it may in fact be.

The translation to this version of the book is by Howard Hibbett and it contains one or two too many Americanisms for my taste but is otherwise unexceptional. Kawabata appears, so far as I can tell, to have written with such precise simplicity that the best thing any translator can do is to keep out of the way as much as possible. This allows the reader to focus on the details of the text and to seek out the nature of those details individually: for example, Keiko several times finishes her costume by tying her obi around her kimono and makes it clear that it is tied very tightly. Indeed, it sounds like she is preparing a weapon, so sharp are the edges in the reader's imagination. Yet the weapon is made effective by becoming disempowered, since it is by virtue of suggesting that the kimono may be undone and discarded that Keiko derives the majority of her power from it. Still, the obi also makes her both a respectable member of society and one who may be compared with portrayals of women in kimonos in the past and present.

Kawabata is, of course, the recipient of a Nobel Prize for Literature and this novel is one of the principal reasons for that award. Readers with any interest at all in the discovering one of the great writers of the modern world will find a great deal to enjoy here.