SOURCE: "Kawabata Yasunari," in Dawn to the West, Japanese literature of the Modern Era: Fiction, Vol 1, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984, pp. 786-845.

[Keene is an American scholar and critic who has produced a number of translations and studies of Japanese literature. The following excerpt is taken from his discussion of Kawabata in the fiction volume of his acclaimed two-part literary history of contemporary Japanese letters. Here he surveys Kawabata's early short fiction, particularly "The Izu Dancer, "placing it in the context of the author's life and artistic development]

Kawabata's first work was probably "Jūrokusai no Nikki" ("Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old"). According to the afterword Kawabata wrote in 1925, this work was composed in 1914 and only slightly changed when he published it eleven years later. He described finding the manuscript in an uncle's storehouse, written on the kind of composition paper used by middle-school students. The diary covers twelve days in May of 1914 and breaks off a week before his grandfather died. Kawabata commented, "The strangest thing was that I had not the least recollection of the events described in the diary. . . . I confronted the honest emotions of a forgotten past. But the grandfather I had described was uglier than the grandfather of my memory. For ten years my mind had been constantly cleansing my grandfather's image."

Kawabata would return again and again to memories of the last days of his grandfather, but never more effectively than in this early work. Some scholars, after careful stylistic examination of the diary, have concluded that, despite Kawabata's insistence on its authenticity, it was probably composed in 1925. Perhaps the most convincing evidence to support this conclusion is that the style of the diary, unlike that of other examples of Kawabata's juvenilia, is free from literary language and conventional flourishes. But regardless of the date of composition, it is an extraordinary evocation of the relations between the boy and the dying old man. The love—and the disgust—the helpless invalid arouses in the boy is superbly conveyed by an unerring choice of details and by the strikingly modern style, which is closer to that of the New Sensationalists than to the models Kawabata usually followed in his boyhood compositions.

Perhaps the most famous passage is the one that occurs when the boy returns home to find that his grandfather, now blind and almost unable to move, has been waiting impatiently for his return. The grandfather asks the boy to bring the urine glass and put his penis into it.

I had no choice but to expose him and do what was asked, though it went against the grain.

"Is it in? Is it all right? I'm starting now. All right?" Couldn't he feel his own body?

"Ahh, ahh, it hurts. Ohh. It hurts something terrible." It caused him pain to urinate. To the accompaniment of breathing so labored it sounded it might stop any minute, there rose from the depths of the urine glass the sound of pure water of a valley stream.

"Ohh. It hurts." The pain seemed more than he could bear. As I listened to his voice I felt the tears come to my eyes.

The water had boiled so I gave him some tea to drink. Coarse tea. I had to prop him up for each sip he drank. The bony face, the white hair ravaged by baldness. The quivering hands of bones and skin. The Adam's apple of his scrawny neck, bobbing up and down with each gulp. Three cups of tea.

The ironic comparison of the sound of the old man urinating and the murmur of a pure stream flowing in the valley explicitly underlined the intensity of the experience. The conversations between the old man and the boy given elsewhere in the story are fragmentary, as if they knew each other so well that a few words sufficed to convey their thoughts. The use of the Osaka dialect also made these snatches of conversation seem especially authentic.

It is hard to believe that a boy, especially a boy who was much under the influence of old-fashioned literature, could have written so simply about the death of his only blood relative; but some details, such as the hope the boy expresses that if he keeps writing the diary until he reaches one hundred pages his grandfather will recover, ring true as utterances from the world of childhood. Quite possibly Kawabata changed more than he admitted when he published the work; in another afterword, written in 1948, he stated that the afterword of 1925 was "fiction" (shōsetsu). He insisted, however, that the text itself was written as he sat by his grandfather's bed. "Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old," in any case, has earned a place in most selections of Kawabata's important works.

Kawabata's first published story, "Shōkonsai Ikkei" ("A View of the Yasukuni Festival," 1921), was, however, in a totally dissimilar mood. It describes a circus equestrienne and her friends in an unmistakably Modernist manner. The conversations are fragmentary and sometimes cryptic and Kawabata has deliberately made it difficult to distinguish between dream and reality in the narration. "A View of the Yasukuni Festival" attracted considerable attention when first published, and demonstrates why Kawabata was at first considered so advanced a Modernist. As a story, it is immature, but the style—the jagged skips that would be a hallmark of the New Sensationalists, though this was well before the movement was launched—and the "objectivity," especially the author's noninvolvement with his characters, were fresh and attracted favorable attention. Kikuchi Kan, a figure of enormous importance in the literary world, was so impressed that when Kawabata visited him, hoping to secure from Kikuchi an introduction to publishers who wanted translations of English literature, Kikuchi astonished the young man by treating him like a person of great consequence. Kawabata revealed to Kikuchi that he needed money because he was planning to marry a girl of sixteen (fifteen by Western reckoning); Kikuchi, far from attempting to dissuade him from making such an early marriage, offered the couple the use of his house while he was abroad, and promised to send him an allowance of fifty yen a month. He said he would ask Akutagawa to help get Kawabata's stories published in magazines.

Kikuchi's interest marked an auspicious beginning for Kawabata's career. Kikuchi also introduced him to Yokomitsu Riichi, urging the two to become friends. The friendship that developed affected most of Kawabata's writings during the next decade and was the most valued of his life. However, Kikuchi's generous offer of a house during Kawabata's first year of wedded life never materialized, in part because Kikuchi did not go abroad, but mainly because the girl Kawabata had intended to marry wrote him saying she could not go through with the marriage. The shock of this betrayal, as he considered it, lingered in Kawabata's memory for years and was given direct and indirect expression in many works.

The most important literary product of this disappointment was Kawabata's story "Izu no Odoriko" ("The Izu Dancer," 1926), the work that not only brought him fame but, even more than his longer novels, remains the one many people remember him for. In order to shake off the depression after having been jilted, Kawabata went on a walking tour of the Izu Peninsula in the autumn of 1918. He fell in with a group of traveling entertainers, and was touched by the readiness with which they accepted him. Such performers were considered hardly more than beggars; indeed, there were signs at the entrances to some villages warning "Beggars and Itinerant Performers Stay Away." Kawabata was attracted to the young dancer of the troupe, but he was especially gratified to overhear several of the performers agree when discussing him that he was "nice"; he had earlier convinced himself that no one could ever really like him.

Four years earlier, in 1922, Kawabata had written an autobiographical account of his journey to Izu called "Yugashima no Omoide" ("Memories of Yugashima"). This work was never published, but Kawabata used some of the material when writing "The Izu Dancer," and the rest went into the novella Shōrten (Boys), written in 1948-1949. He stated on completing the latter work that he had now destroyed the original manuscript of "Memories of Yugashima." Only about a third of the manuscript was devoted to the dancer; the rest described his love for a middle-school classmate. This love was of the utmost importance to Kawabata, as he recalled thirty years later. A letter he wrote to his beloved friend (but never sent) contained such phrases as, "I feel that you are the god who will redeem me. . . . You are the fresh shock of my life." Kawabata in later years explained this attraction to another boy in terms of having grown up in a household without women. Some of the revelations of his love for his classmate, called Kiyono in Boys, were submitted as a high school essay (as he recalled to his astonishment), but there were parts that he never dared show the other boy. Kawabata did not forget this experience, the first he had of being loved, and when as a man of fifty he wrote Boys he stated that he had felt much deeper love for Kiyono than for the Izu dancer. Yet his manuscript about Kiyono remained unpublished, perhaps because he judged that readers would not accept so unconventional a theme. He chose instead to write a story about the performers he had casually encountered in Izu, recognizing that it would have more general appeal. The wisdom of this decision was confirmed by the popularity of "The Izu Dancer."

Kawabata quoted in Boys a few tantalizing fragments of his meeting the Izu dancer as originally related in "Memories of Yugashima." This is how the unpublished story had opened:

Every year the number of itinerant players who make their way from one hot spring resort to the next, performing where they can, seems to be decreasing. My memories of Yugashima start with some traveling players. That first trip to Izu glitters in my memory with the light from the comet that was a beautiful dancer and with the sights along the way from Shuzenji to Shimoda that were like the comet's tail. It was in the middle of autumn, just after I was promoted to second year at high school, and this was the first journey worthy of the name I had taken since coming to Tokyo. I spent one night at Shuzenji. While walking along the Shimoda Highway to Yugashima, just after passing the Yukawa Bridge, I ran into three girls, traveling performers, on their way to Shuzenji. The dancer who carried the drum stood out among them, even at a distance. I turned back again and again to stare at them, and I thought that at last I had really experienced the joy of travel.

Compare the foregoing with the opening of "The Izu Dancer":

The road ahead began to twist. Just as I was thinking that I must be getting close to Amagi Pass, a shower swept by me with incredible velocity, whitening the dense cedar forest as it passed.

I was twenty. I was wearing the regulation highschool cap, a dark blue and white kimono with a hakama, and I had a student bookbag slung over my shoulder. It was on my fourth day out since I began my travels in Izu. I had spent one night at Shuzenji Hot Springs and two at Yugashima Hot Springs, and now I was climbing Amagi in my high wooden clogs. I was enchanted by the mountains that rose in layers one above the other, by the virgin forests, and by the suggestion of autumn in the deep valleys, but at the same time a kind of expectation kept agitating my heart as I hurried along the road. Before long heavy drops of rain began to fall. I quickened my pace up the steeply twisting road, and breathed a sigh of relief when I at last managed to reach an inn at the northern end of the pass, only to halt in my tracks at the entrance. My expectations had been almost too perfectly answered: a troupe of itinerant players was stopping there. . . .

I had seen the dancer and the others twice before. The first time was when I was on my way to Yugashima. I had run into them near the Yukawa Bridge as they were heading for Shuzenji. There were three young women, and the dancer had carried a big drum. I turned back again and again to stare at them, and I thought that at last I had really experienced the joy of travel.

Although the later version borrowed phrases and even one sentence from "Memories of Yugashima," the effect is unmistakably different. The earlier version is more personal, rather in the manner of the "I novel"; in the later version the "I" is hardly more than a nameless high school student who observes the scenery and the people he encounters. Nakamura Mitsuo suggested that the "I" of "The Izu Dancer" corresponds to the waki of a Nō play, an itinerant priest or anonymous traveler whose function is to introduce the spectators to the shite, the central character of the play. This is true of the men in other works by Kawabata, who serve mainly to set off the women; though sometimes they appear to resemble the author, they are not the vehicles for his reflections and emotions as in an "I novel" but hardly more than the waki who induces the shite to appear before us.

Kawabata himself dismissed his Izu stories (including "The Izu Dancer") as being mere "traveler's impressions." This statement, made in 1934, reflected the extreme diffidence he always showed with respect to his works, but perhaps this was also his conviction. At the time that he wrote "The Izu Dancer" he was deeply involved with the New Sensationalist school. He insisted in articles he wrote on behalf of the movement that "newness" was all, and expressed boredom with established patterns of expression:

Our eyes burn with desire to know the unknown. Our mutual greetings are expressions of our delight at being able to discuss together whatever is new. If one man says, "Good morning," and another replies, "Good morning," it is boring. We have become quite weary of literature that is as unchanging as the sun that comes up from the east today exactly as it did yesterday. It is more interesting if one man says, "The baby monkey walks along suspended from its mother's belly," and the other replies, "White herons really have long talons, don't they?"

"The Izu Dancer" was clearly not new in the manner advocated by the New Sensationalists. There is nothing remotely startling in the expression. The reader is charmed by the story, impressed by Kawabata's skill in capturing the atmosphere of Izu and portraying the figures he encountered, but if one finds newness it will be in the emergence of a new and important writer, not in stylistic mannerisms. Other works of the period, notably the scenario Kawabata wrote for the New Sensationalist film Kurutta Ichipēji (A Page out of Order, 1926), demonstrate that he was quite capable of creating works that followed the Modernist principles. "The Izu Dancer" seems unrelated to Modernism, and that may be why Kawabata dismissed it so casually.

The story of "The Izu Dancer" is quickly told. The narrator is attracted to a dancer, the youngest of a troupe of itinerant performers he meets in Izu. He thinks of asking her to spend the night in his room, but when by accident he sees her emerge naked from the steam of an outdoor hot spring, he discovers she is still a child, despite her grownup clothes and way of arranging her hair. This discovery, far from disappointing him, frees him of constraint, and he happily accompanies the troupe to Shimoda, where they part. Aboard the ship on which he returns to Tokyo he weeps, but not out of sadness.

The popularity of "The Izu Dancer" probably owes much to the film versions, the oldest the one directed by Gosho Heinosuke in 1933. The story has been interpreted, perhaps also because of the films, as a rare example in modern Japanese literature of the pure love of adolescents. If this is true, "The Izu Dancer" is a distinctly unfamiliar variety of love story. Although the student hopes for a while to lie with the dancer, he never addresses to her anything resembling a lover's endearments, and he is relieved, even purified, when he realizes that she is too young for lovemaking. She represents for the student the romance of travel, rather than romance itself, and for this reason it is preferable that the ideal not be tarnished by physical involvement. Kawabata throughout his career was attracted especially by virginal, inviolable young women. These were by no means the only women he wrote about, and they are not necessarily his most successfully achieved portraits, but for Kawabata they seem to have represented the essence of beauty. Perhaps, as Mishima Yukio suggested, Kawabata was fascinated by virginity because it is impossible to take it without losing it.

Kawabata's insistence on the mystic beauty of virginity was traced by another critic to Kawabata's first experience of love for the girl who betrayed him. This critic believed that Kawabata's painful disappointment in real life indelibly affected his treatment of women in his works of fiction. The pure maidens do not gradually develop into mature women, but the two remain forever apart and distinct. Indeed, Kawabata generally found ugliness rather than beauty in mature women, and that may be why they are more effectively characterized in his novels than the beautiful virgins. Kawabata was at pains to deny this critic's "discovery" of the source of his Izu dancer, but ended by wondering if there might not be something to the theory, though he himself was unaware of ever having thought of his fiancée when describing the dancer.