The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

By Kawabata Yasunari

Translated by J. Martin Holman

(1926, 1955, 1997)

Counterpoint

(Short Story Collection)

Part One of this collection features four short stories that are autobiographical in nature. Kawabata’s parents died before he reached the age of three; his grandmother died when he was eight, and his older sister died soon after. He was raised by a grandfather who passed away when Kawabata was fourteen. Throughout the entire collection, Kawabata returns again and again to the topics of beauty, desire, and chastity. Chastity and virginity, though directly named and more often than not identified with a female figure, is the lens through which Kawabata studies his life as a man and an artist. Each time he addresses this trio, he seems closer to “knowing” the world, though in more than one story, characters end up embracing air. Part Two consists of eighteen short-short stories or what Kawabata called “Palm-of-the-Hand” stories. These are enigmatic, occasionally koan-like stories from which the author has pared everything unnecessary away. The remaining “skeleton” is not immediately recognizable as a form in itself. Connective tissue is rarely offered. There are sudden jumps in time, place, and perspective.  In place of resolutions, expect an unexpected rendering of an image. Instead of interior monologue, be prepared for an acute focus on one or more sensory stimuli. Kawabata was a supporter of the “New Perception” school, so he certainly embraced Modernism, nevertheless, his work was always informed by his deep knowledge of traditional Japanese poetry and prose.

Part One:

“The Dancing Girl of Izu”

Mr. Kawabata tells the story of a shy, depressed, and insecure young man who turns his back on his stressful life at a prestigious university and “gets away from it all” by taking a walking tour of the Izu Peninsula. Although he seems comfortable in his role as a solitary adventurer when he encounters a family of itinerant showmen, his misanthropic mood shifts. The family is made up of a young man, Eikichi, his wife, several young women, and a young girl who carries a large drum, whom he imagines to be about his age. He is quite taken by the girl and modifies his pace and his itinerary in order to meet up with the group as much as possible.  The scholar finds Eikichi easy to talk to. They become fast friends, and although Eikichi and his troupe are entertainers and of low class and the scholar is far above them in social status, the young man enjoys Eikichi’s easy way of talking and begins to look to him as a role model. At times they travel together, at others they split up so that the troupe can perform at the inns along the way. The scholar finds himself persevering over the beauty of the young girl. He imagines the two as heavenly lovers and a look from her causes his heart to leap. Then. one late afternoon he stumbles upon the family in a public bath and discovers that the woman he admired so much is actually no more than a child. He is shocked, but he also experiences an epiphany. He no longer sees the drum carrier as an object of erotic desire but as an expression of innocence and beauty. His desire was a burden to him and with this discovery, he is able to put it aside and focus on his wonderful experiences with this family. As time passes, the family regards the scholar as very friendly and caring and they tell him that they never expected someone like him would deign to spend time in their company. Later, he even overhears the women sharing their belief that he is a good man. This praise is a powerful restorative to the young traveler, and it matures into a new confidence he feels as they part and he sets off for Tokyo.

“She had an open way of speaking, a youthful and honest way of saying exactly what came to her, which made it possible to think of myself as, frankly, ‘nice.’ I looked anew at the mountains, so bright that they made my eyes ache a little. I had come at nineteen to think myself a misfit, an orphan by nature, and it was depression that had sent me forth on this Izu journey. Now I was able to think of myself as a ‘nice’ person in the ordinary sense of the expression. I find no way to describe what this meant to me. The mountains grew brighter.” (144)

“Diary of My Sixteenth Year”

Kawabata presents fragments of a diary he kept during his sixteenth year. In an afterword, he informs us that published the piece ten years after his grandfather’s passing, adding commentary in brackets. He also adds that at the time he counted his age according to traditional practices; he was actually fourteen years old when he composed the diary. The diary itself reveals not only the young boy’s grief but also his struggle to deal with his grandfather’s pain, dementia, and physical needs. A local servant prepared food for the grandfather and helped when she could, but her daughter gave birth and she needed to split her time between caring for her daughter and grandchild and Kawabata’s grandfather. The grandfather is referred to as “unfortunate” throughout. He is presented as a man who tried many paths to success but never achieved his goals. He hoped to publish a book he dictated called A Theory of Safe House Construction, a record of his learning, experiences, and insight into divination and geomancy, essential knowledge for determining the size and structure of a home that will provide security and good fortune. He was also highly regarded as a practitioner of traditional medicine and is credited with saving the lives of many villagers during an outbreak of dysentery. The servant regularly visits a diviner, who determines that a hungry demon lives in the belly of the old man. He advises the old man to eat certain foods and recommends that they place a sword beneath the sick man’s pallet to drive out the demon. Looking back on this period, Kawabata is surprised that his fourteen-year-old self never sought out a western doctor—he even confesses that he waved the sword over his grandfather’s head. The servant happened to discover him in the midst of this ritual and cheered him on solemnly, saying “That’s the way. That’s the way.” Many years later Kawabata wrote a second afterword, revealing that he perhaps exaggerated his report that his deceased grandfather’s medical bag was not “full” of his diary. He takes pains to point out that the diary was quite short and that he can remember details that were not included in the diary. He also adds two additional pages he discovered which were not included in the 1925 printing. He ends the piece pondering the role of memory, lost memories, and the challenge of recording or capturing time, place, and emotion.

“My grandfather died on the evening of the great funeral for the widow of Emperor Meiji. I was torn as to whether I should attend the local memorial service. My middle school was in town, almost four miles south of my village. For some reason, I felt anxious and wanted desperately to attend the ceremony. But would my grandfather die while I was gone?” (60)

“Oil”

“Oil” is an analysis not only of Kawabata’s reaction to loss–the death of both his parents by the age of three and the subsequent loss of his grandmother and sister–but also of the role of story in memory. Kawabata explains that he has virtually no memory of his parents. True, from time to time, while visiting the neighborhood of his birth home, he experiences a sensation that he was there before, but in those cases, he imagines he was alone. It is necessary for friends of the family to explain to him that such an incident was impossible, such as crossing a bridge by himself at age two, and that he must realize that his sensation is a false memory. Similarly, he realizes that some essential elements of his very identity are tied up in the stories told to him about those early years of his life. An aunt tells him that at his father’s funeral, he threw a tantrum, insisting that the ritual oil lamp be put out. In his fury, he took the lamp outside and poured the oil in the garden, and then went back inside and broke all the candles. From that time he experienced a revulsion for almost all varieties of oils. A drop on his skin might cause him pain, an oil stain on a kimono must be immediately cut out, and he could not tolerate an aftertaste of oil in any food. Later in life, he realizes that the story of his tantrum at his father’s funeral appeared to have even influenced the conduct of his grandfather, who stopped using oil as part of his Buddhist rituals so as not to traumatize young Kawabata. But as he matures, Kawabata realizes that the story his aunt told him may be more of an exaggeration than a true representation of his behavior that day. Approaching the story as a kind of detective of memory, he comes to the conclusion that he would have not been able to carry the lamp without interference from an adult and that there was no garden in the house of the funeral. Once he understands that his aunt’s story may have been a well-meaning blend of fact, fiction, and metaphor, Kawabata discovers that he is free of its burden: the world becomes much brighter, and he can once again tolerate and indeed relish the use of oil in his home and life.

“And so the tears I shed for the death of my parents whose faces I do not even know were born of a game of childish sentimentality. Certainly their deaths wounded me. But this wound would only be clear to me after I grew old and looked back upon my life. I imagined that until then I would simply grieve according to emotional convention or after the form I had seen in literature.” (74)

“The Master of Funerals”

In “Master of Funerals,” Kawabata reflects on the reputation and role he assumed after he experienced so much death in his young life. In his twenty-second year, relatives and friends call upon him to attend three funerals in one month. For each funeral, he dons a silk gauze coat his father left to him and dutifully makes his journey and performs the appropriate rites, becoming a student, as it were, of different Buddhist rituals. His friends note that he is particularly well-suited to the role of a mourner. They give him nicknames: “Mr. Mortician,” “Funeral Director,” “Master of Funerals.” Reflecting on his ability to typify the very embodiment of a noble mourner, Kawabata admits that he has no recollection of his parents. His mother was never photographed, so he has no idea of what she looked like. And although there were as many as forty pictures of his father, he had lost them all by his twenties. All he remembers of his deceased sister is the back of her white mourning kimono as she was being carried on a relative’s back to the funeral of their grandmother. The first memories he has of being moved by a funeral are associated with the light on his family altar at the death of his grandmother.  He scrawled her name that day on the screen before the altar; it remains to this day. When he reflects on his grandfather’s funeral, he recalls that he was twice overwhelmed by a nosebleed. Embarrassed, he excused himself twice during the ceremony. The second time the bleeding was more intense; he lay on his back outside and attempted to stop the bleeding with his black sash. When he eventually returned, his sash stiff with dried blood, his cousins chastised him. Yet now, Kawabata accepts his role as a model mourner with pride. He even explains his secret: his reverent posture, deep solemnity, and fervently clasped hands come easily to him as he attends the funerals of people he knows only tangentially, for each new funeral allows him to grieve again for his many, many personal losses.

“My eyes grew weak. About thirty minutes later I heard distant voices calling me repeatedly. I fretted about my sash, which was soaked with blood. But hoping no one would notice since it was black, I returned to the crematory. Everyone’s eyes were filled with reproach. The bones had been uncovered, and they told me to pick them up. With a desolate heart, I picked up the small bones.” (85)

“Gathering Ashes”

At first, “Gathering Ashes” appears to be a brief retelling of the last pages of “The Master of Funerals.” In this version, young Kawabata is on the hillside behind the crematorium, crying for his deceased grandfather and trying to staunch the flow of blood from his nose with his kimono sash. The older children are crueler in this retelling and the aunt is more emotionally detached. Kawabata also forces us to look at the reality of death and the work of the crematorium. Brought back inside, he is forced to look at the white cloth on which rests an amorphous mass that was pulled from the ashes. This, they say, is evidence that his grandfather has become a buddha: it is the old man’s Adam’s apple. Then, he must accept his grandfather’s death fully by raking his fingers through the coals and removing the old man’s foot and hand bones. The day ends with a trip to the cemetery, where the boys lift away the family stone and dig a deep hole—it seems as deep as a well—into which young Kawabata places the urn. Then, just as we imagine the story has ended, the authorial voice enters to announce that the document we have just read was taken from his teenage journal and that Kawabata, at age fifty-one, can clearly detect elements of fiction in the entry. He informs the reader that he edited the piece slightly for publication and left it mostly intact, though he chose not to publish a companion piece called “To My Home Village.” Then, despite his decision to keep the final work unpublished, he quotes from it, revealing a savage, resentful, and nihilistic voice that is heard nowhere else in the collection.

“At the wake the night before, my grandfather became a spirit of blue flame. He flew out through the roof of the shrine, floated through the rooms of the nearby quarantine hospital, and left a disagreeable odor as he drifted through the village sky.” (90)

Part Two

“Hurrah”

“Hurrah” is a spare, impressionistic sketch of onsen culture. The story is set in a small town that is home to two inns that cater to visitors to the local hot springs. Can a three-page-long story have a frame? If it can, it must be embodied by the two beautiful sisters who work at the two onsen baths. Each is striking, but together they can take the breath away. An itinerant opera performer insists that they both sit together in the audience so that he can make eyes with them from the stage-otherwise their presence will be too distracting. Despite the attention, the sisters are shy, retiring, and modest. The real story—perhaps—is the rather wanton woman who confesses to a male visitor to the baths that she has been at the town for a month and has grown bored. She explains that her goal is to visit all the onsen throughout Japan, and as she has limited funds and requires an escort, she stays at each bath until she can find a trustworthy gentleman to take her on the next stage of her journey. The gentleman agrees, and they and the town celebrate her departure.

”I feel sorry for you, having to put up with my irritability and melancholy every day. But I don’t want to die like a beggar before I reach the hot spring at the northernmost point in Hokaido. I wonder how many hot springs there will be between here and there. I must make it while I am young; no one will take me once I am old.” (99)

“The Princess of the Dragon Palace”

This short-short story begins with a recounting of the origin of the Princess of the Dragon Palace. With his dying words, a father tells his children that he has been betrayed and murdered by his wife and her lover. He commands his sons to celebrate his funeral, bind their mother to a memorial stone, and toss both off a cliff and into the sea. The sons carry out their father’s request, but as they watch their treacherous mother fall away, clinging to the great stone, it transforms into a sled, and she rides over the snow. When the miraculous sled reaches the sea, it turns into a small boat, which sails to safety. When the children toss their mother’s paramour over the cliff, he too experiences the same miracle. Stunned and overwhelmed at his survival, he urges the wife to say a prayer to her dead husband for rescuing them. The treacherous wife curses the man, warning him that at any sign of remorse, his boat will once again become a stone. The folk tale turns in even more unexpected directions until its unpredictable conclusion, at which point the narrator tells us that the woman who told him this story betrayed her husband and she and her lover actually did throw themselves into the sea. Although the consequences of her attempted suicide were significantly different from the folk tale, the nameless woman declares “It was just like the fairy tale. To the very end—exactly the same.”  

“The sons, children by his first wife, nimbly carried the gravestone to a precipice above the ocean. The stone was taller than the woman, their enemy. The cliff was so terrifying that when they dropped a rock, it grew smaller as it fell, until it looked no larger than a sesame seed; but they became dizzy and had to stop watching before it hit the water.” (100)

“The Money Road”

The story is set on September 1, 1924. The city of Tokyo is celebrating a memorial to the thousands of citizens who died during an earthquake the previous year. Historically, the quake is called either The Great Kanto or Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake. The 7.9 quake occurred at noon in a metropolitan city. It leveled hundreds of thousands of buildings, triggered a forty-foot-tall tsunami, and set off so many fires that it created a firestorm. It is estimated that 130,000 people died. “The Money Road” focuses on two characters, both of who are living in the Asukasa barracks built to provide temporary housing for survivors. Granny who is fifty-six, lost her husband and sixteen-year-old daughter in the fire. Even a year later, she is overwhelmed by grief. When she finds a lost comb in the dirt, she cannot help her tears. Kenta or Ken is a fraud. He is a beggar who was nowhere near the quake; he came to Tokyo to take advantage of the free food and housing. He convinced Granny to name him as her husband so that he could get services. Ken encourages Granny to join the masses of people who are going to the site of the Military Clothing Depot, which was the center of the firestorms. Knowing that the pilgrims to the site will be offering coins for the deceased, he persuades Granny to join him in a quest to gather as many coins as their boots can hold.

“Coins. At their feet were copper coins, copper coins, silver coins. The ground was covered with coins. They were walking on coins. A mountain of coins had accumulated before the white cotton draperies in front of the charnel house.” (106)

“Chastity Under the Roof”

In this short-short story, a third-person narrator introduces us to the survival strategy of a family-less Christian girl. She is impoverished, beautiful, and literate. Each day she casts herself on the mercy of the fates, addressing three identical letters to three new men; she will spend the night with the first of the three to respond to her note. In this way, she finds security. What about her strategy guarantees her safety? What role does prayer or faith play in her practice? What does the story reveal about the author’s perception of what it means to be born a woman?

“At three o’clock in the afternoon on the hill, she quietly blossomed into a moonflower. All around her were new buds that had let the morning air touch their infant skin for the first time and now grieved on the tips of the tree branches that the first night of their lives should come.” (109)

“The Moon”

Like the previous story, “The Moon” focuses again on chastity, though whether Kawabata sees that word as an anatomical condition or a philosophy is up to the reader. The speaker, a young man, talks about his progress through the world carrying on his back the baggage of his chastity. He avers that he will not sacrifice his chastity until he finds a woman willing to spend her entire life with him. He describes many situations when desirable and desirous women appeared to proposition him and notes that the longer he remains chaste the more women are attracted to him. In the end, he proposes that he give his chastity to the one woman he trusts will be his companion for life: the moon.

“Virginity—what an insufferable nuisance you are! You are baggage I would never miss. And as I walk along dusky back streets or bridges, it would be nothing to me to dump you into a trash can or river. But now that I have emerged onto the brightly lit paved street, I am afraid it will be hard to find a place to dispose of you.”  (111)

 “Enemy”

Yet another exploration of the topic of virginity. In this instance, an accomplished movie actress sits alone in a theater, watching herself play a young woman sold into prostitution by her parents. As she watches herself onscreen, she relives her own loss of virginity, which she describes as a “horrible event,” and recognizes that as she played the character, she suffered the original trauma of losing her virginity with her entire being. Sitting in the theater, she weeps with the character on the screen. The confusing doubling of perception, reminiscent of the work of Borges or Kafka, becomes even more complex when a film director and another actress enter the theater. Sitting directly in front of the woman, they obscure her line of sight. Now the new actress’s face is superimposed on the actress on the screen. Which of the four is the true woman? The character on the screen? The mature actress? Or the actress who just entered the theater and begins commenting on the actress’s performance?

“In her life, the actress’s parents had been her first enemies. Her older brother was her next. And so, from that time on, she saw every person in the world as an enemy. Men were particularly her enemies.” (114)

“A Woman”

“A Woman” reads like a koan. A samurai approaches a Zen priest, who asks the warrior if by chance he came across a house on fire. The samurai reports that he not only saw the burned-out house but also saw a woman who wept passionately over the body of her deceased husband. The priest, after first claiming to have the ears of a buddha, argues that the woman’s tears were false. In his estimation, she and her lover must have killed her husband by driving needles into his brain and then setting fire to the house in order to hide their crime. Shocked by this revelation, the samurai returns to the burned house and executes the woman. But is all as it seems? The Samurai, now overwhelmed by doubt, returns to challenge the Zen priest. Is he a fraud or a master?

“But at the moment I saw my sword flash, I began to doubt your words. The woman was clinging to the charred corpse, wailing as loudly as she could. She clasped her hands together and thanked me. ‘Would you kill me?’ she said. ‘Would you send me where my husband has gone?’ She thanked me and died smiling.” (117)

 “Frightening Love”

A disturbing short-short story about a man who is guilty of loving his wife too much. When she dies, he believes the gods are punishing him for his excessive love. From that moment on he avoids any interaction with women, for every woman reminds him of his late wife. He hires only men to cook and do chores. Then, as his daughter approaches middle school, he discovers that she is developing into the very image of her mother. He watches her secretly as she goes about her personal hygiene, trimming her nails. The young girl, is she aware of her father’s concupiscence? Is she in communication with her deceased mother? Her rituals become more complicated; perhaps she is performing a kind of magic.

“It was not that he hated all other women, but simply that all women reminded him of his wife. For example, to him, all other women smelled like fish, just as his wife had. Wondering if this feeling itself was heaven’s punishment for loving his wife too much, he resigned himself to a life without a trace of a woman.” (119)

 “Horse Beauty”

“Horse Beauty” is a puzzle complicated by multiple and conflicting points of view. In simplest form, it is the story of a villager who leaves his wife and daughter for another woman. The now-single mother continues to work in the fields while raising her daughter. She consoles herself with a fool’s laughter: “There is no one is as generous I. I gave my husband to someone else!” But the husband also claims to be an agent of charity: “There is no one who is as generous I. I gave my daughter, my horse, and my house to my wife.” The villagers conflate the identity of the horse and the daughter left behind “as they were both needed. The daughter is deep-voiced, masculine in her features and yet so feminine that she excites the attention of the young men of the village. At sixteen, she meets a young man; at the same time she comes into conflict with her mother: while plowing the field, the daughter, who is leading the horse, keeps pulling the plow from the furrow. The mother chastises her and the daughter flees her home. The mother laments that her daughter was like her husband; her husband regrets nicknaming his daughter “horse beauty” and thus shaping her character, another reports that she sold the horse and fled the village with a young man, and one fellow claims that he saw he ride the horse into the sky.

“There were only two eyes in the village that moved like points of light and both belonged to the horse beauty. Her eyes were dark, her voice as deep as a man’s like the voice of a sumo wrestler who has broken his Adam’s apple. Moreover, it became more masculine over the years. But, for the horse beauty, the masculinity seemed only to enhance her femininity.” (122)

“The Sea”

In “The Sea,” Kawabata turns his attention to Koreans brought against their will to Japan to work as laborers. There are about seventy of them. They have just completed a three-year-long project of building a road through the highland forest. Now unemployed, the community is heading down from the mountains. One girl, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, stops to rest at a place where the trail overlooks the ocean. When she claims her stomach is hurting and that she will move along soon, friends offer to wait with her, but she sends them on their way. As each new group encounters her, they offer to wait with her but she always waves them off. Finally, a lone man approaches. He explains that he is the last one and that no one will follow. He offers to carry her down the mountain and make her his wife. She objects: her father has long ago made her promise that she would only marry after returning to Korea. In the end, the man persuades her that she would be better off marrying him. She agrees, so long as he promises her that as he carries her he will avoid any sight of the sea.

“Looking down at the summer sea, the girl felt light-headed. The shrill sound of the cicadas permeated her body. Every time one of the laborers passed by on their way from the mountain village—in fours or sevens or twos—the same thing happened.” (125)

“Hands”

“Hands” focuses on the gesture of prayer; it may be productive to read this in tandem with “The Master of Funerals.” In a small room by the sea, a husband wakes early and stares at his new bride as she sleeps. Struck by the way thee bed covers all but cause her body to all but disappear, he panics. Is she deceased? Reacting to tragedy, he assumes a posture of prayer, clasping his hands. His bride awakens, tossing aside the covers and chastising him with a sharp tongue. After a short exchange, the husband returns to bed and tries to assuage his wife’s anger with a kiss. “Stop it,” she exclaims, “When I am awake you do this, when I’m asleep you treat me like a dead person.” Despite his devotion to his wife—or because of it–she runs off with another man. As he must, he prays for her return.

“Still, there were two things his character could not permit him to do: express gratitude or ask forgiveness directly. When he stayed at someone’s home, he could not wait for bedtime so he could press his palms together as he did every night in his devotions.  He believed that in this way his unexpressed feelings could somehow be communicated to others.” (129)

“The Third-Class Waiting Room”

Here, Kawabata works as an illusionist. Set in a train station, “The Third-Class Waiting Room” focuses on the thoughts and perceptions of a man who is waiting for an assignation with a married woman. As he sits in idleness, he reflects on the conversation he shared with this woman and the minor disagreement they had over the selection of the rendezvous. Meanwhile, his attention is drawn to a Buddhist monk and his young acolyte. They are pilgrims; he can tell by the rough hat the younger man wears and the Buddhist poem that is inked across its brim. Contemplating the purity of the path these men follow and considering his own concupiscence, he considers again why he is drawn to the woman who asks to meet him in the third-class waiting room.

“…when he arrived at Tokyo Station, he could not go directly to the third-class waiting room. He was not the kind of man himself. Noting that it was still fifteen minutes before five o’clock, he went to the waiting room reserved for first and second-class passengers. A movie of the scenery at Matsushima was being shown on a small screen recessed into the wall. He thought of an old friend in Osaka and wrote a letter. Only after making a trip to the station post office with the letter could he bring himself to enter the third-class waiting room.” (133)

“The Watch”

A young, insecure lawyer is on a first date with a young woman. The man sweats, struggles with anxiety, and says the wrong thing. A sudden reversal: he comments on the watch peeking out from beneath the young lady’s sleeve. First embarrassed—the watch does not work and is of poor (Japanese) quality—she warms up to him when she shares that it was a gift from her mother; she wears it as a memento. Sensing a shift in her attitude, the lawyer finds the courage to take her hand. At this point, an authorial voice intervenes, commenting on the inevitability and the banality of what must follow. The voice suggests an alternative ending, and with a single line turns comedy to tragedy. At three pages, “The Watch” is a powerful study of the art of meta-narrative.

“Enclosing this bit of atmosphere inside the small cab, he tried to keep the sensation of the young woman close to him and not let it dissipate. But inside this car racing through the cold night with no sound of wind, his emotions shrank toward cowardice. He forgot where he was. He spoke absentmindedly.” (136)

 “History”

This short-short story is a cautionary tale with anti-capitalist and pro-ecology themes. As in “Hurrah,” the story is set in a village with a scenic hot spring and an onsen culture. When a highway is constructed up into the mountains, the citizens, fearing that it is too large for their needs, conclude that the government is planning for war. As the months pass, their fears are allayed when large work crews arrive to begin the construction of a mansion for a wealthy industrialist. He fell in love with the white stones of the region and chose to build his home here so that he could look down on the village below and pipe water from the spring to his villa. To compensate the villagers for the disruption, he lays pipe underground and leads the hot waters to the village center, where he creates a large bathing pool for the villagers. As time passes, he expands the village pool, increasing its amenities. When the old man passes, the villagers, who have long forgotten the natural pool that was once their pride, celebrate the generosity of the baron who loved to read classical poetry and contemplate the landscape. And all is well until the old man’s son arrives, someone who is nothing like his father, a profit-driven modern man.

“In his villa, the old man wrote Chinese poetry and haiku praising the view of the stream and the valley. He enjoyed the fresh vegetables the villagers brought him. The old spring was buried under fallen oak trees.” (140)

 “Birthplace”

A mother has left for Tokyo to care for her pregnant daughter, leaving behind a twelve-year-old son. He was left in the care of a neighbor, but the boy appears to be living on his own. A month passes. The mother writes a letter to her son asking him to come to Tokyo, though she does not send any money for the train fare. Studying the comings and goings of the scrap dealers, the boy discovers the power of making deals and earning money. He sells the family teapot, skillets, and the clothes of his deceased father for mere pennies. When a scribe comes looking to rent a house, he sells the family home for five yen. Flush with the excitement of his trading, the boy buys his ticket and arrives in Tokyo. When he tells her how he became self-sufficient, she is almost undone. The loss of her husband’s clothes is particularly painful. She had sold off almost all of her kimonos for food rather than sell a single one of her husband’s suits. And her eldest son was counting on the sale of the house to help him start in business. The boy, meanwhile, goes fishing, catching enough carp to feed a group of children he has just met. Perhaps both “Birthplace,” “Burning the Pine Boughs,” and “A Prayer in the Mother Tongue” are best read together; collectively, they deal with attachment, materialism, and identity.

“These transactions made the boy feel like an adult, part of this strange life in which one is capable of obtaining one’s daily provisions. But when he received the money, from the scrap dealer and the scribe, he sensed clearly the wretchedness and fatigue of their lives. Still, after these initial ventures, he felt like a winner. He knew he could survive.” (143)

“Burning the Pine Boughs”

This story is set in Atami. The nameless narrator is a young man who is living with his lover Okayo, a high school dropout. Neither are from Atami. No doubt they moved to this village to avoid criticism and gossip. Okayo is lately troubled. The house was burgled and the thief had peered at her from the skylight over the bath. Worse, he returned a second night. Now, the young man and the girl become uneasy at nightfall, each listening to the creaks and groans of the roof. Is it the wind? Rats? The young man imagines he sees the profile of the thief in the darkness of a movie theater. A few nights later, they are awakened by drumming. Being outsiders, they are unfamiliar with the customs of Atami. Could this signal a forest fire? Or is there a local festival? There is a large fire near the shore, perhaps there is a shipwreck? In the midst of their speculation in the dark, Okayo announces her intention to break off their relationship, move in with her sister, and return to school. Caught off guard, though far from being upset, the narrator approves of and is even inspired by her desire to control her life. In the morning, they discover that the disturbance in the night was indeed a festival, a ritual burning of the pine bough decorations that adorn the village houses throughout the season. They feel regret that they did not pull down the pine boughs from their house and bring them to the ritual fires, but when they leave the house that morning they discover they are gone.

“It was still the first week of the new year, but the temperature in Atami was in the seventies for two days, as though it were early summer. The newspaper ran a photograph of plum blossoms in a park in Tokyo with a caption that read ‘Plums Deceived into Blooming.’” (145)

“A Prayer in the Mother Tongue”

This short story begins as if it were a cold essay on the mind and linguistics– and then metamorphoses into a heartbreaking romance that is uniquely Japanese. The narrator provides a series of anecdotal reports of immigrants to other countries who, by all accounts, lost the ability to speak in the language of their birth. In every case, however, in the final moments of each of these people’s lives, as they approached death, they began speaking fluently in their native tongues. Although a romantic might see something beautiful in the return of the soul to its original language, the linguist posits that the mother tongue is the prop that supports the figure in life, and that when at last, it leaves the body, the flesh collapses. At this point, the narrator makes an abrupt and unexpected association. He reveals that he had an affair with a girl named Kayoko. He broke off the affair, though in the last weeks he has found himself dreaming of her. But time has passed. He is now married and has a family. Then one day he receives a strange guest, a man he has never met: the father of Kayoko. He carries a letter from the girl, and on reading it, he discovers that their long-ago love was Kayoko’s “mother tongue.”

“Had the affair with Kayoko made him so conceited that he thought that he could be the object of someone’s jealousy? Perhaps. Even now he had to be taught by the grasshopper that his break with her was moral. Maybe because it was not.” (157)

“The Setting Sun”

This might be the briefest and most enigmatic of the “palm-of-the-hand stories. Reading it I was reminded of Balthus’s 1929 painting “The Street.” As with many of Balthus’s paintings, the figures are uncanny, strangely isolated in a timeless atmosphere, and yet there is an overall sense that they are bound by interconnecting stories. There is a similar technique at work here in these two pages. There is a poet, a waitress, a special delivery agent, and a woman on a train platform. They speak in fragments. Phrases are repeated. From one voice they are banal, from another, they open up a new possibility. An amorous wag refers to a woman’s breast as the future and her backside as the past, while another speaks of the past and future as if making a profound declaration of a political or artistic mission. A character appears to have a flash of understanding and there a group of children hop up and down, each vying to be the one who sees the very last of the setting sun.

“Then the poet whispered to the crowds who passed by him.

‘Hey, you people. You are going toward the past. I am going toward the future. Is there anyone who will walk the same direction as me?’” (161)