KAWABATA'S STORIES TRANSLATED
Author: By Robert Taylor, Globe Staff
Date: Wednesday, August 24, 1988
Page: 32
Section: LIVING
He called them tanagokoro no shosetsu, that is to say "stories that fit
into the palm of one's hand." Between 1921 and 1972, Yasunari Kawabata,
Japan's only literary Nobel Prize winner, published 146 of these exceedingly
short stories, 70 of which have now been collected by translators Lane Dunlop
and J. Martin Holman performing a signal service for the Western reader.
The short story was Kawabata's preferred length, and though it is a cliche
to compare the results to haiku poems or the image executed with a single
flowing brushstroke, there is no question that he felt most at home in forms
where more is implied than stated.
The pieces fuse Western modernist experimentalism with the indirection of
Japanese statement. In his magisterial study of Japanese literature, "Dawn to
the West," Donald Keene relates that Kawabata not only read the translation of
"Ulysses," which Ito Sei and his collaborators introduced to the Japanese
public in 1930, but bought a copy of the English text and compared the two.
Furthermore, the palm-of-the-hand stories suited Kawabata's temperamental
disinclination to struggle with the architecture of the novel. His lyric
perceptions have a stronger affinity with the delicate harmonics of poetry
than with the heavy labor of prose construction. Indeed he himself once
pointed out that "Snow Country," one of the novels that established his
reputation in the West, could have been broken off at any juncture.
Notwithstanding, one chapter led to the next.
So, too, did the short short stories inspire another; he wrote them in
bursts, with two-thirds of the present volume completed between 1923 and 1930,
a smaller selection from the early '30s until 1950, then a final blossoming in
the '60s. His last work, in fact, before his suicide in 1972, was a reduction
of "Snow Country" to its essentials. Here the process reversed itself. Usually
Kawabata found all his themes present in his first statement of the material,
even if he sometimes stretched out the stories into larger dimensions.
"Gleanings from Snow Country" represents a departure from his usual methods.
It is not a condensation of the whole novel but of the first quarter, and by
concentrating on the man Shimamura and the geisha Komako a spare emotional
intensity is attained, though one misses the narrative's atmospheric effects.
The variety of the stories is impressive. Some are well-made, elegant,
carefully crafted, others autobiographical fragments, still others jagged and
dreamlike. There are trick endings, allusive symbols, erotic grotesqueries,
eerie fables. Dunlop remarks that "Thank You," less than four pages of terse
paragraphs and even more economical conversation consisting largely of
repeated "thank you's," was once made into a movie, which certainly declares
the ingenuity of the film makers. Death appears repeatedly -- as a child
Kawabata lost so many relatives that he came to be known as a "master of
funerals," then later used the phrase as a title. Readers of the novels will
recognize other aspects: mirrors and masks, the desire for the virginal, the
yearning for a love which, if realized, would dissolve. Since Kawabata is the
most elusive of writers, the translators are faced by formidable obstacles
from the title onward, but acquit themselves ably despite a few stiffish
passages.
RTAYLO;08/19 LDRISC;08/24,16:32 WEDBOOK2
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