Something Strange Across the River

Kafū Nagai’s short story “Something Strange Across the River” (1937) brings us to the streets of early 1900s Asakusa (then the center of Shitamachi “low city” culture and entertainments) and Yoshiwara and surrounding districts. Plenty of nostalgia for how things had been during the narrator’s/Nagai’s youth (“the old, nostalgic world made manifest as muse to my exhausted heart”), and some of this yearning for days past and the imagery reminded me a little of Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929). I enjoyed most the descriptions of this then-waning world our protagonist walks us through across the Sumida River, like:

I pushed aside the high grass and climbed up the hillside of the embankment. There were no objects to obstruct my view of the street I’d just come up. The rambling old towns, empty lots, and developing areas could all be seen. On the other side of the river, corrugated iron roofs spread out in all directions, broken here and there by the towering chimneys of the baths, all of it cast in the glow of the setting summer sun. At one end of the sky the colors of sunset grew weaker and colder as they drifted away. The moon shone bright, as if night had already come. Between the iron roofs, in the gaps that showed the streets, neon signs crackled to life, and the echoes of radios clicking on here and there rose up from the town.

Also interesting/amusing was the narrator’s disdain for the Ginza area and “inner-city” and its “distasteful sorts”, as in:

There are other sights to be wary of in Ginza. The middle-aged man, for example, in his perfectly cut foreign suit and distasteful countenance, his hair perfectly styled, his occupation nebulous, swinging his cane as he walks down the street and sings to himself, berating the young women and the children who cross his path.

I don’t think the story itself will stick in my memory for very long, but it was certainly worth the read for the picture of this time and place.

The Dandelion

It’s impossible to trust any text that’s incomplete, and Kawabata’s novel The Dandelion (also Dandelions, Tanpopo) was published posthumously and unfinished (in 1972). An editor’s mindset kicked in while reading this (an exercise in itself), and I wonder if the author might have scrapped this ragged story if he’d lived longer. Polishing it would’ve done away with the repetition and inconsistency, but the whole thing doesn’t feel like it could be ironed out into anything on par with Kawabata’s other novels. Kafka died before finishing The Castle, but reading that you get a clear idea of where he was going with it. The Dandelion, on the other hand, comes across as half-baked.

Kawabata possibly realized it was a dud… There’s an exchange in the last few pages that starts with Ineko’s mother bringing up the phrase tōne no sasu kane—a bell with a distant ring. She says, “It’s a nice way to describe the sound of an old bell, don’t you think?” To which Ineko’s lover replies, “A distant ring. Yes, that’s nice, and you could say that about this conversation, too.” The book up to this point has mostly been this conversation, long and wandering, between the two. The mother, channeling Kawabata, I imagine, comes back with, “Don’t be ridiculous—not this random chatter.”

I agree.

There are some wonderful Kawabata-ish descriptions and sentences here, though. These make it worthwhile to read, but its lack of cohesion and rather stagnant plot make it unenjoyable overall.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

"The Dancing Girl of Izu", particularly its last three pages, is excellent for its delicate poignancy. After that comes a series of vignettes, like postcard-sized watercolors, that Kawabata called palm-of-the-hand stories. Blending fiction and memory (his parents and sister died when he was a child, then his grandparents during his adolescence), as well as misremembering and gaps, Kawabata evokes mono-no-aware through sparse, seemingly evasive, prose.

Kawabata could deliver a lot with just a handful of words. There's Ryunosuke Akutagawa in his style too, with a similar underlying downheartedness. Akutagawa created fuller, more defined pictures, while Kawabata's stories can read like experimental scraps requiring some supplementation—an enlightening book club discussion, maybe, or an academic lecture—to throw light on the depths. "The Dancing Girl of Izu" is the strongest in this collection, but others are sure to linger in the reader's mind.

A question for myself to ponder, or for anyone who can provide the answer: Why do paulownia trees appear so often in Japanese literature? Their literary significance eludes me. With countless tree species in Japan, I doubt the paulownia serves merely as an object of imagery; there must be more to it.

Title: Paulownia Trees at Akasaka in the Evening Rain; Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige II; Date: 1859