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

Runaway Horses

Mishima's second novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy is set in the early 1930s and follows Isao Iinuma, son of Shigeyuki Iinuma, who served as a tutor for Kiyoaki Matsugae, the protagonist of Spring Snow (published serially, mid-1960s). Kiyoaki offs himself in the first book, and Honda, a childhood friend of Kiyoaki’s who plays a big part in both novels, believes Isao is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki. Both Isao and Kiyoaki are rather unpleasant characters. Kiyoaki is petulant and conniving and Isao is tragically naive.

Isao is also an idealist, nationalist, and wannabe revolutionary who vows, with a bunch of other somewhat sycophantic schoolboys, to emulate “the purity of the League of the Divine Wind, hazard ourselves for the task of purging away all evil deities and perverse spirits.” He plots a coup d’état or, as he calls it, a “Shōwa Restoration,” which seems doomed from the start. Lots of Mishima fantasizing here and perhaps for himself weighing out the merits and virtues, and folly and futility, of such an insurrection.

The narrator (omniscient third-person) tells us: “This was a plan that struck at every great capitalist family in Japan. All the zaibatsu-controlled heavy industries, iron and steel, light metals, shipbuilding—an illustrious name from each of these sectors was on the list. That morning of mass killing would, beyond any doubt, send a severe shock through the economic structure of the nation.”

OK, so there’s that, with a lot of soapy he-feels/she-feels meandering and digression (if he’d cut 200 pages out of this, it’d be more solid, cohesive.) Then there’s the idea that Japan was pure before being polluted by the outside world and outside ideas. Even Buddhism gets a bad rap by characters in this book.

I can’t remember reading a Mishima novel in which seppuku is not romanticized. But in Runaway Horses it comes up again and again and again as a sublime act of purification.

Narrator: “…when Isao felt a guard’s hand touch the moles on his side and squeeze them momentarily, he realized once again that he could never commit suicide out of humiliation. During his sleepless nights in the detention cell he had toyed with the thought of killing himself. But the concept of suicide remained for Isao what it had always been, something extraordinarily bright and luxurious.”

This recurring theme in Mishima novels can make reading his work difficult, considering how the author took his own life. What ended the creator interferes with the art that outlived him. I shouldn’t let his suicide interfere with his fiction, but it does.

I liked this one better than Spring Snow, which more often seems to lack direction and purpose. Runaway Horses isn’t an easy read either. The second half is stronger and more interesting and makes up for some of the long-winded time-wasting in the first half. And it’s a book that makes you want to ask the author a bunch of questions starting with Why…