Yasunari Kawabata
Hideo Kobayashi
Yasunari Kawabata is often said to be a man who never lets people catch him by the tail, or a man who never shows himself in public. This is probably the easiest comment to make about him. This is because his complex, artificial literature simply somehow aligns the complex, artificial human beings in the reader's mind. In fact, he does not have the capacity to grow many tails, and he does not believe in a self-assured self. He just deals with the world in a natural and clumsy way. And this is also the simple, unchanging framework of his complex, artificial literature.
It is good to be careful not to be deceived by the complexity of human beings and of literature. Especially in a society as complex as ours today. There are many types of cynics, but they seem to be the best at being confused by complexity. I am not even sure that I can think of a major type of modern human being from this point of view.
Nothing disgusts me more than to see people who happen to have been born into a complex society and who have become complex because they handle things in the same way as most people, and then claim that complexity is the privilege of modern people. What an abomination! It is nothing more than a loss of willpower.
The idea that it is natural that complex societies produce complex people, and that such people produce complex texts, does not add anything to our understanding of the essential aspects of human beings and literature. It is another matter, however, that such a view allows people and literature that seem completely unrecognisable to flourish.
I have no faith in people or literature that do not rebel against the complexities of society. The social life in any era must be complicated enough for the people of that time, and the extremes of human belief in the order of beauty and goodness have never been complicated.
When I read Dostoevsky's works closely, one thing that at first struck me as paradoxical, but finally convinced me of their irresistible simplicity, was the astonishing simplicity of his convictions. The only people who would be so impressed by the complexity of his work and then complain about it would be those who would not have the patience to hear the complex chords of his work until they were heard in a single voice.
Dostoevsky tried to defend a certain indescribable and extremely simple truth that he believed in, in everything he did, all his life long. The extraordinary ingenuity he had to employ in order to achieve this was nothing short of the extraordinary complexity of his work. He did not describe a complicated picture of life. He would have preferred to do without such things. Walking the world is like walking a tightrope. All of the care he had to take to cross the rope was reflected in his work. I could see that clearly.
Individuality is the Emperor. I think that the causes of my personality and psychology may be external to me, and it would be more true if they were. But the cause of my individuality is only within me. If I do not believe in it, there is no such thing as my individuality. This is the reason why the term "Tenraku" (natural ease) was born. That is how I want to interpret the word "individuality." When Flaubert, on the subject of this method, complained that his method of literary change could not touch the individuality of the literati, I think that is what he had in mind. One is unique according to what one believes one is. No, otherwise we would be lost in the use of the word "individuality."
The ultimate conclusion of self-reflection is that the self can only be known in pieces. Only those who have not reached that point and are still on the way prefer confession. As one confesses, one invents a temporary psychology and personality, and then disappears somewhere else. It is a bold improvisation.
I do not have much faith in man's ability to observe man objectively. Try to observe yourself calmly. The spirit that does not feel the pain, that does not feel the uncertainty of the intrusion of the foreign object of observation, is not a living spirit.
"The inevitability of history is the mother of our birth, but no one knows its father," says Valéry. Whatever the name you call it, you cannot say such a thing to someone who does not believe in fathers. The artist's work is to propose, in the name of beauty, the human condition that can be rescued from the history that gave rise to it. Art historians do a strange thing: they try to restore the saved human being to his original state.
I tried to write about Yasunari Kawabata, and it seems that I wrote a lot of digressions, but it was Yasunari Kawabata who inspired me to do so. I picked up the pen because he was the one who led me to the following place.
In the 'Yasunari Kawabata Selected Works' published by Kensho-sha, a photograph of the author is included in each book, and among them is a very beautiful photograph taken at the time of his high school entrance examination. They took many photos of the author looking at a birdcage with a bookshelf in the background, but they were no match for the photos he took for the entrance examinations. This is not my theory. It is probably the author's own theory. It is not only about photographs. In one of the books, the author's diary from when he was sixteen years old is included in its original text, and in his 'Afterword,' he writes that it is "outstanding among my works" and that "my literary talent was never precocious. I fear that my extraordinary talent will not reach the level of my boyhood diary, which I continued to write until I was over forty." What does this mean?
But it is he himself who is asking the question. As the question, not the answer, becomes clearer and clearer, he begins to see the truth of what he believes to be his own individuality. Perhaps he wants to call it his work. The various devices he tried to give his work a clear form, his own explanations for this.
"I will not reveal the reason why Mr (Harue) Koga seems to have had some favour for me. I have always been seen as someone who follows or seeks out new trends and new forms in literature. I am thought to be a lover of novelty and interested in newcomers. I even have the honour of being called an "illusionist" for this reason. If so, this is similar to Koga's life as an artist. Koga's constant desire to create avant-garde work, his desire to play a progressive role, and the seemingly endless changes in his style, may have led some to treat him as a magician, as I do. By the way, how could we ever be illusionists? I was smiling in the summer when I was named magician, although the other party may have thought it was a slight. The reason was that he, one of the thousand people, did not see the lamentation in my heart. If he had really thought that, he would have been a fool who had been tricked by me. I am not, however, playing magic to fool people. It is merely a manifestation of my feeble struggle against the grief in my heart. I don't care what people call it." ('Morning Eyes')
I read with great care 'Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old,' which he himself says is his first work and his only true autobiography. There is nothing wrong with the fact that the handwriting is so strong and precise that you would not believe it was a child's work. I thought it was an excellent piece of writing, but I soon realised that the best appreciator of the diary was Yasunari Kawabata himself, and that was more important. Perhaps it was the diary that gradually grew in his mind and gradually came to be seen as an outstanding work of art. When he found his boyhood diary in his hometown warehouse at the age of twenty-seven, it is doubtful whether he could have said unequivocally that it was the outstanding work of his, as he has recently declared, but I have no doubt that it was a powerful revelation to him in his form-drawing days, when he was known as a master magician. He announced it immediately.
A seventy-five-year-old man is dying half-crazy and alone, and his sixteen year old grandson is looking after him. He feeds the old man and replaces his duplicate bottle. He pulls out his sword to drive away a hairy creature that has possessed the old man. He then unfolds a sheet of manuscript paper and captures the old man's words and deeds with genuine emotion. "I was quietly sad inside and copied every word with a pained expression on my face, without smiling."
I wonder what kind of revelation Kawabata-san read from this diary, and let me try to describe it in my own words, it is the horror of being a child. "The grandchildren all understand." The grandchildren understand their grandfather's old age, his loneliness, his despair, his ridiculousness, his goodness, and his compassion. What is left undiscovered in the hearts of human beings, where the love and sorrow of children move, what is essential? Knowledge can no longer add much to this. This is the basis on which the term "fairy tale" developed within Yasunari Kawabata in a unique way.
I would like to use the term "fairy tale," which he himself likes to use but uses ambiguously, somewhat more clearly. For him, the land of fairy tales does not lie above the heavens, but rather on this side of the world, at the end of adult perception, not beyond it. The kind of heaven that common sense would have us believe in, a heaven for naïve children who yearn for anything, is what the author distrusts the most. There is no room for such fantasies anywhere in the boy's diary.
Is it not astonishing that what the boy depicts with his minimal talent of simply being honest is the eternal state of human illness, death, and life? And why shouldn't the boy's world rise up in protest against the intricately processed world of adults, where ideals and disillusionment are jumbled together under every opinion, theory, interpretation, and critique?
People love to talk about Yasunari Kawabata's novels and beautiful lyricism, but they are "fools who have been deceived." Yasunari Kawabata has never written a single novel.1 How indifferent the writer was to the things that are usually the subject of curiosity for novelists, such as what our daily lives are like, how we encounter and follow social systems and customs, what conflicts arise between two people with different ideas and personalities, etc., can be easily understood by reading his works with a little care. He does not have the gift of depicting two men or even two women.
The novelist's disqualification is that he is not a novelist. Disqualification of the novelist takes place at the heart of the writer's personality, and the idea of the fairy tale matures on the strength of the "lament of the example."
It is not surprising that he is unaware of the fact that he loves to read the compositions of boys and girls. He is ordered to become a physiological man rather than a social man. Tamio Hojo, Masako Ogawa, Masako Toyoda, and Fumiko Nozawa are, so to speak, just his favourite parts of the world. Falling away from the robe of history, human beings sing a uniform song that is in accordance with their physiology. His intelligence makes him see this path as a kind of romanticism, but it is in vain. The Emperor takes him away. With one foot he leads the way from 'The Dancing Girl of Izu' to 'Snow Country,' and with the other from 'The Master of Miyakoji' to 'The Calligraphy.'
He is also a critic who has been writing literary reviews for 13 years. He knows what he is talking about. However, for a genuine artist, simple talent such as understanding things is far from being a gift. It is a mistake to think that natural talent is easy. The artist must find it and believe in it, and that is its cost. He is that sacrifice. Therefore, he is also a kind of incompetent. "I've decided to go to Manchuria next time," he laughs, "but mine is for a funeral, with Wu Qingyuan."
This is a reference to Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s concept of the “plotless novel,” or “novel without novel-like qualities.”