The Decay of the Angel

A messy, half-baked beginning, but the story comes together and held my attention after Honda adopts Tōru Yasunaga and the boy gradually reveals his wickedness. The tetralogy was a sometimes frustrating and dull read for its tiresome philosophizing and, as Donald Richie pointed out, for Mishima's tell-don't-show approach, but then there were descriptions that dazzled and wholly unexpected turns. I found the third of the four novels, The Temple of Dawn (1970), most compelling (except for Honda's long rumination over his various theories about reincarnation). I disliked or despised a few of the characters, especially the reincarnations, Kiyoaki, Isao, and Ying Chan, and also Tōru. Suicide is a theme in all four books. After reading these, there's something sad or more hopeless about Mishima that I hadn't felt after reading his other works.

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