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…

The Samurai

Shusaku Endo’s The Samurai (1980) is a fictional account of a 17th-century diplomatic mission from Japan to “Nueva España,” or present-day Mexico, and then beyond to Spain and Rome. There’s a lot to this novel as it shifts between first- and third-person narrative, and from historical adventure to travel narrative, political drama and meditation on certain interpretations of faith and Christ.

It came as a surprise to me that Endo based the characters on actual historical figures. As Van C. Gessel, the book’s translator, points out in the postscript, “Endō’s novel, besides being a superbly crafted piece of fiction, is a valuable work of speculation.” A group of about one hundred Japanese, along with Spanish sailors, really did travel to what is now Central America and then crossed the Atlantic and met with Pope Paul V. But almost no documents about their journey exist today.

For Endo, this skeleton must’ve compelled him to provide the right flesh and blood. Through his prose it's clear he spent considerable time working out each detail and contemplating the intentions and motivations of the characters and countries in play. The story also explores missionary work as a precondition for international trade (for Catholics, not Protestants), the rivalry and animosity between Franciscans and Jesuits, the hardships of sea travel, and methods of torture and killing used in Japan to humiliate and terrify Christians. The novel is also interesting for its depiction of Luis Sotelo (the Franciscan friar on which one character is based) and Christianity in the Tohoku region.

As an aside, I found this amusing… An excerpt from a 1982 article by Julian Moynahan, writing about Endo and The Samurai for The New York Times:

“Shusaku Endo is modern Japan’s most distinguished Roman Catholic novelist. If that description makes you blink, consider that a cross-national survey of religious belief published in American newspapers within the past year reported that among the populations studied, the Japanese came last in the percentage of people expressing any belief in immortality or the survival of the soul after death. Another recent survey, comparing I.Q. averages among populations of some leading nations, Eastern and Western, places the Japanese at the very top. It would seem, then, that Mr. Endo has his work cut out for him. Willy-nilly, a great part of his primary readership will be extra-bright people who are either not religious at all or who profess attachment to a religion for the sake of social solidarity, tradition, ceremony or worldly advancement.”

Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, the samurai who sailed to Rome and met Pope Paul V in 1615.