SOURCE: "The Asymmetrical Garden: Discovering Yasunari Kawabata," in Southwest Review, Vol. 74, No. 3, Summer, 1989, pp. 390-402.

[In the following essay, Palmer examines Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories in an attempt to demonstrate that the form the author employed in these pieces was much more congenial to his talents than the novel form.]

In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Concerning this unprecedented citation, Professor Donald Keene, in his gargantuan work of scholarship (Dawn To The West, 1984), writes: "The Japanese public was naturally delighted to learn of the award, though surprise was expressed that a writer who was difficult to understand even for Japanese should have been so appreciated abroad."

While it seems an odd instance of refreshing insight that the Swedish Academy (emphatically Occidental in literary sensibility, at least until 1968), chose Kawabata, one of the most scrupulously traditional of modern Japanese writers, the greater likelihood is that the selection was influenced more by timing than by appreciation. One story maintains that, regardless of the nominees for that year—lawrence Durrell, Albert Moravia, Gunter Grass, Robert Graves, and Mao Zedong, among others—the Academy's decision to recognize a writer from Japan was predetermined (another typically belated gesture at geographical equilibrium). Sweden dispatched an agent to reconnoiter the literary situation in The land of the Rising Sun. By this point in the century, Japan's principal literary voices had entered, or were nearing, eclipse. Jun'ichiro Tanazaki had died just three years before. Kawabata's "disciple," the volatile and prolific Yukio Mishima, was a mere fortythree years old, and still in the midst of his chef d'oeuvre, the tetralogy, Hojo no Umi (The Sea of Fertility). Even if Mishima's spectacular public sepukka in 1970, upon completion of his multi-volume novel, could have been anticipated, the militant nationalism of his last years was the kind of extremist persona that makes Stockholm quail. The somewhat esoteric Kawabata, then, was in the right place at the right time. This is not to begrudge him the honor. On the contrary, the 1968 Nobel Prize for literature was one of those rare, extremely rare occasions, when merit and circumstance coincided.

In awarding their prize, the Nobel Committee cited three of Kawabata's novel-length works: the enigmatic masterpieces, Snow Country (1937), Thousand Cranes (1952), and the rather less accomplished The Old Capital (1962). His novel The Sound of the Mountain (published in tandem with Thousand Cranes and awarded the literary prize of the Japanese Academy in 1952), was unmentioned. This is curious because there is some consensus that The Sound of the Mountain is Kawabata's most successful, fully realized work in the long form, a form that was not at all congenial to his style, his writing habits, or the traditional aesthetics that dominated the essence of his fiction.

The fundamentals of this aesthetic, and of Kawabata's fictive vision, evolved from some of Japan's earliest literary texts, the touchstones of Japanese literature, for which Kawabata had a deep, enduring reverence, particularly lady Murasaki's eleventh-century work, The Tale of Genji, Buddhist canonical texts, and Basho's seventeenthcentury haiku. Kawabata provides the edifying analogy for this vision, this aesthetic, in his Nobel acceptance speech, Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself (tr. by Edward Seidensticker, 1969): "The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities."

Just as the architectonic symmetry of Western literature can be traced as far back as Homer's meticulously symmetrical Iliad, so can the asymmetry of the "Japanese garden," this delicately imposed balance symbolizing multiplicity and vastness, be evidenced in lady Murasaki's Genji, a work that served as a crucible for almost an entire literature. In his intelligent, concise book, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, J. Thomas Rimer explains that the Western reader, "surrounded by the rich emotional universe [Murasaki] has provided for him, may have some initial difficulties in persuading himself precisely what the narrowly defined purposes of [Genji] might be. There seem so many possibilities. The text.. . is obviously planned on an enormous scale, and its structure is organic. Themes and characters appear and disappear, swept along by movements of time, which moves all before it. Genji. . . was not planned in such a way that every detail of its structure and design can be referred back to some central, tightly organized conception in the mind of the author. In fact, time in lady Murasaki's novel flows precisely like a river, occasionally picking up bits of extraneous, even irrelevant, information, which the author was not always at great pains to remove."

This essence of organic structure, the flowing, streaming movements of time, was ultimately the pervasive force that shaped, or formed the character of, Kawabata's fiction. He was bound to it, artistically and intellectually—the suggestive power of the asymmetrical text, spreading ever outward.

This is not to say that Kawabata was dismissive toward the aesthetics of Western literature. Much of his early work was deemed Modernist in a fundamentally Western sense of that word, and one detects the influences of Proust, Freud, and—most explicitly—Joyce, in Kawabata's story, "Needles, Glass, and Fog," and his 1931 novel, Crystal Fantasies, works in which Kawabata experiments with stream-of-consciousness.

But Joyce's Ulysses, that masterwork of Modernism, despite its ostensibly free-flowing "streams" of thought and other apparent caprice, nevertheless follows a rigorous design and "tightly organized conception." It's a work of ingenious, intricate symmetry. Kawabata's "Modernism" was chiefly technical; he never attempted to import the essence of the Western novel, but he trafficked in its innovations to perhaps expand and enrich his own literary inheritance.

His success was uneven, and only obliquely discernible. His forays into stylized territories were brief, abortive. What Western literature contributed to Kawabata's artistic growth was perhaps a deepened appreciation for the beauty and traditional virtues of Japanese art and cultural sensibility, and the unique efficacy they brought to fiction writing.

There, in part, lies much of the difficulty of his work to Japanese and especially Western readers. As an artist profoundly conscious of his Japan and its indigenous literary texts, Kawabata seemed constitutionally unable to produce a novel in the patented notion of that form—a notion by then assimilated by modern Japanese letters—a selfcontained and ultimately self-referential structure, an object of art existing independently and completely. Kawabata's "novels" are not really novels at all; the term is an anomaly. (Shosetsu, the Japanese approximation for the word novel, literally means "brief account," and was only in usage one hundred years when Kawabata won his Nobel.) Much of his long fiction fits the criteria for the Post-Modern "anti-novel": plotless, amorphous strings of text holding the frail beads of character, recurrent images, abstruse "themes," carefully constructed tableaus. Works like Snow Country and Thousand Cranes are best described as extended narratives. They are, after lady Murasaki's Genji, meandering rivers of sensation, organic structures, suggesting vastness and enormity without necessarily growing to such proportions. Their purposes and component parts are elusive, unstressed, and nebulous, and the works, as a whole, seem unfinished.

In Snow Country, the conflict and tensions that form the plot dynamics are so restrained and impalpable that they must almost be intuited. What seem to function as the climactic events of the novel—a conversation of delicate nuances between the dilettante Shimamura and the geisha Komako, followed by a fire that kills the other significant female, Yoko—are subtle to the point of obscurity. In Thousand Cranes, Kawabata eschews subtlety altogether, opting for out-and-out omission; before we are given any explanation, or even sufficient information to speculate on the possible signification of the thousand-crane-pattern kerchief that furnishes the title, the book stops.

That is the way of Kawabata's extended narratives. They don't end, they stop. This mystifying abruptness was intensified by the standard practice of serialization. In twentieth-century Japan, Kawabata and his contemporaries composed novels in the fashion of nineteenth-century British and American writers, by periodical installment. While this arrangement of producing for deadline furnished Kawabata with a welcomed discipline, it was certainly ill-suited to his literary temperament. He wrote for a number of magazines, some of which catered to the literati, others geared toward less discerning tastes. Chapters of a work-in-progress would appear in a variety of publications, until Kawabata discontinued a particular narrative to turn his attention to another project. Other works might run on interminably (Tokyo People, 1955, reached 505 installments before its publication in four volumes), before stopping with characteristic inconclusiveness. When a "completed" narrative appeared in book form, Kawabata sometimes appended or elided chapters, or sometimes did not, leaving it flawed by the repetitions endemic to serialization. Writing novels was an arduous task. The aesthetic fulfillment they provided Kawabata is indistinct. He was trying to find harmony with an artistic form essentially antithetical to his genuine, singular strengths. Speaking specifically of Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain, he addressed this dilemma:

Each should have been a short story that concluded in one episode. All I did was to keep sounding the overtones of what I had written. For that reason, I should have ended both works after the first chapter; such is the brutal truth. The rest was probably mere self-indulgence. The same holds true of Snow Country. I console myself with the hope that one day I shall write a novel that will be provided from the start with the framework for a long novel and with a theme, and not be a mere prolongation of the first chapter in my usual way.

(tr. Donald Keene)

Still, the idea that these works might be "mere selfindulgence" is probably mere self-deprecation. like his fiction, Kawabata was quiet, modest, a helpful and sedulous writer who deferred to the natural lyricism he perceived in life, and the possibilities for transcendence that this lyricism offered the spirit and the intellect. Despite the ambiguity and irresolution of his narratives, their resonating overtones, like richly colored glazes, form works of elegant, textured beauty. That he persevered in so untenable a form and managed to produce contemporary works of timelessness and grace is a testament to his recondite genius.

And like so many of our Occidental genuises—Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Pound, and Kafka, to name a few from this century—Kawabata's art evolved under the specific conditions exerted by his vision. An insistent, idiosyncratic perception, if forceful enough, ultimately develops its own form, or retools ancient and existing forms to accommodate its character, its tonality, and its intent. For more than fifty years, Kawabata composed small pieces of fiction that he called tanagokoro no shosetsu (stories that fit in the palm of one's hand). These are artistic cells, microfictions. Broadly, they displayed Kawabata's traditional Eastern affinity for the efficiency and beauty of the miniature. Beyond a matter of taste, however, the pieces demonstrate Kawabata's literary gifts in their most potent, purified forms. The "palm-sized" stories constitute the marrow of his artistic essence, and this essence is a constant refinement and exploration of the East's prototypical aesthetics and philosophical thought. They are stylized, intuitive studies of the tension, mystery, melancholy, and beauty of being alive in an ephemeral, unfathomable universe.

Unless one could read Japanese, however, these short, short works, which Kawabata sometimes referred to as the essence of his art, lay long untranslated. Finally, seventeen years after Kawabata's death, a selection of over seventy palm-sized stories are available in English (Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988), perhaps occasioned by the West's invigorated interest in things Japanese. Whatever the inspiration, the availability of these works is significant, and an opportunity (for those of us not scholars of Japanese literature), not necessarily to reevaluate Kawabata, but to approach an understanding of a major twentieth-century literary figure for the first time.

Kawabata wrote 146 palm-of-the-hand stories. Their dates show that Kawabata produced them in clusters; he composed them in abundance in the 1920s, the significant first decade of his literary career. The number dwindles in the first half of the 1930s, then stops. Near the end of World War II, however, he resumed writing palm-sized stories (during the war years, Kawabata spent a great deal of time rereading lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji and other early Japanese texts), and there follows another gap of more than a decade. His final piece of fiction, "Gleanings from Snow Country," was composed three months before his suicide in 1972, and is a particularly telling, palm-sized version of the novel written thirty-five years before. It is obvious from these groupings that as his reputation grew, so did his obligations to other projects, leaving him less time for work that he perhaps found preferable. But the fact that these stories span almost his entire literary life reveals his profound affection for the form, and his need to return to it, dispelling any idea that it, like his excursions into Modernism (or Surrealism, "New Sensationalism," "New Psychologism"—other schools to which he matriculated) was simply affectation or experimentalism.

The appellation, "stories that fit in the palm of one's hand," like the fiction it describes, is both simple and intricate, luminous with suggestive subtleties. If Kawabata intended it strictly as an image conveying the physical brevity of the pieces, its incongruity—a story we can cup in our palm like an insect, a bit of water, a stone—would seem merely quaint. But this incongruity invites us to consider the correctness of the image; it has the expansive, unfolding potential of haiku. What one can hold in the palm of one's hand can be an object of simple, possessable beauty, yet with a suggestion of vastness beyond the immediacy of the object, like a diamond, with its complex arrangement of light, and inner planes, wrought by eons of pressure, a miner's physical labor, a cutter's steely precision; or, more in keeping with Kawabata's environment, the beauty of an ancient tea bowl, with its lacquerings of personal, social and artistic suggestion.

The uncanny aptness of Kawabata's image, at once succinct and spacious, is easier to grasp after reading these small works. They adhere to no formula. Besides those that function as actual stories, some are merely descriptions of dreams, others are autobiographical sketches. There are stories that read like folk tales, fables, parables, and Zen koans. So much is implicit, so many of the tensions, paradoxes, and harmonies are reliant on one's sometimes uncooperative facility for sudden comprehension that the tales often seem impenetrable, elliptical, or porous. For the most part, Kawabata sounds no overtones, just tones; he provides a construct of events, objects, relationships, and natural settings, and it is up to a reader's individual understanding of some element or nuance in the text to give a palm-sized story its completeness.

The stories don't function as humor, however, in which one must possess a certain level of knowledge in order to feel the shock of intended irony. They comprise a variety of levels and potentials. There are gradations of meaning, innumerable approaches at interpretation, a sophisticated array of doors and windows through which one can access the text. With Kawabata, one may locate, or perhaps even experience, a subtle epiphany, feel a little throb of excitement from the tale or its telling, but it's a highly subjective, intuitive occurrence. Intended or otherwise, this is the corollary of all literature: that exclusive intimacy a writer shares with his each individual reader. Only, in Kawabata, this exclusivity is intensified by his balancing of what he includes and what he omits, resulting in—as in the asymmetrical garden—a symbolic vastness. Even his grace notes and apparently decorative images offer a palate of possible shadings. Abstract and synesthetic, they often change the texture of a story, turning the real into the surreal, the conscious into the hallucinatory: "The smell of the surf was like a green light"; "A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made the sound of autumn"; "The spring snickered yellowly."

Palm-sized stories don't necessarily defy definitive critical interpretation. On the contrary, they encourage it while at the same time rendering it pointless. Borges wrote: "Since we can no longer see through a text to its origins, in intention or ascertainable meaning, we must either reject interpretation, or allow every possible reading as a valid addition to the omnilogue of texts." I imagine that Kawabata would be well satisfied if one approached his fiction with the intellectual innocence of the latter (along with Wittgenstein's plea: "Don't think, look!").

To a twentieth-century reader, Eastern or Western, it's difficult to abandon this divining rod that trembles for significance, for indisputable meaning. Even lane Dunlop—who shared translating duties with J. Martin Holman for the new North Point edition—in his first experience with palm-sized stories in the late seventies, admits he "mistook their subtlety for slightness, their lack of emphasis for pointlessness." Exegesis and interpretation are adjunct to the mental process of reading. A palm-of-the-hand story requires the kind of synthetic appraisal we give to paintings, photographs, sculpture, or architecture: one first sees a work, perceives it, assimilates it. It requires a reader to read, as per Nabokov's instruction to his Cornell students, "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine." And brevity of Kawabata's stories wonderfully facilitates this kind of reading. They flit by us, like something we think we've seen in the corner of our eye. Many of them are short enough to be taken in in one breath and, like the following piece titled "The ring" [1924], quoted in their entirety:

An impecunious law student, taking some translation work with him, went to a mountain hotspring inn.

Three geishas from the city, holding their round fans to their faces, were napping in the little pavilion in the forest.

He descended the stone stairs at the edge of the forest to the mountain stream. A great boulder divided the current of the stream; swarms of dragonflies hovered and darted there.

A girl was standing naked by the bathtub that had been carved out of the boulder.

Thinking she was eleven or twelve, he ignored her as he shed his bathrobe on the beach and lowered himself into the tub at the girl's feet.

The girl, who seemed to have nothing else to do, smiled at him, showing herself off, as if to attract him to her rosy pink body. A split-second glance at her told him that she was the child of a geisha. Hers was an abnormal, precocious beauty, in which one could sense her future purpose of giving sensual pleasure to men. His eyes, surprised, widened like a fan in their appreciation of her.

Suddenly, the girl, holding up her left hand, gave a small scream.

"Ah! I forgot to take it off. I went in with it on."

Allured despite himself, he looked up at her hand.

"little brat!" Instead of being irritated at having been taken in by the girl, he suddenly felt a violent dislike for her.

She'd wanted to show off her ring. He didn't know whether one took off one's ring or not when one entered a hot-spring bath, but it was clear that he'd been caught by the child's stratagem.

Evidently, he had shown his displeasure in his face more strongly then he'd thought. The girl, turning red, fiddled with her ring. Hiding his own childishness with a wry smile, he said casually, "That's a nice ring. let's have a look at it."

"It's an opal."

Sure enough, as if very happy to show it to him, the girl squatted at the edge of the tub. losing her balance as she held out the hand with the ring on it, she put her other hand on his shoulder.

"An opal?" receiving an intense impression of her precocity from her pronunciation of the word, he tried repeating it.

"Yes. My finger's still too small. I had the ring made specially of gold. But now people say the stone's too big."

He toyed with the girl's little hand. The stone, a gentle, luminous, warm egg-yolk color suffused with violet, seemed extraordinarily beautiful. The girl, bringing her body straight forward, closer and closer, and gazing into his face, seemed beside herself with satisfaction.

This girl, in order to show him the ring better, might not be surprised even if he took her, all naked as she was, onto his lap.

"The ring" is relatively straightforward, as palm stories go, but, like a painting, it can be enjoyed immediately, unconditionally, for its choice of colors, the arrangements of its elements, the ending tableau. Curiously enough, it also has something of the circumstantial ambiguity of a painting. Off in the background of the hot-spring setting, Kawabata has placed "Three geishas from the city, holding their round fans to their faces . . . napping in the little pavilion in the forest." He never explicitly establishes any relationship between them and the naked girl, even after the student culls her past, present, and future from his "split-second glance." The geishas are simply there. It's up to the reader to embrace the obvious (if it is obvious), or succumb to uncertainty, or just to accept them as pictorial detail and visual balance.

But the story is complete, elegant, and satisfying, on a purely artistic, sensory level. Kawabata's structural precision and stylistic beauty mitigate a feeling of compression. Instead, it has a fullness, a density, and this is achieved, upon closer examination, by a subtle system of assonance and harmony between character and action, character and color: the geishas with their "fans to their faces," and the student, later, with "his eyes, surprised, widened like a fan"; the naked girl, young—"her rosy pink body"—but with a lurid future of sensual pleasure, and her opal, "a gentle, luminous, warm egg-yolk color," but suffused with a far more livid color, violet. Kawabata suggests that her intelligence is too big for her years, just as her gem is too big for her hand. She exposes her immaturity by turning red, while the student conceals his childishness "with a wry smile," —a coincidental reversal that alludes, again, to the napping geishas.

These vertices of association, and the delicate ambiguity and suggestiveness adumbrating almost all of the story's elements, give "The ring" a fullness of tone and texture that often eluded Kawabata in many of his extended narratives. The palm-sized stories gave his diaphanous touches room to expand. One wonders how resolute was his "hope that one day I shall write a novel that will be provided from the start with the framework for a long novel and with a theme." In his 1934 work, lyric Poem, Kawabata wrote, "Compared to the vision of the Buddhas and their life in the world beyond as depicted in the Buddhist scriptures, how very realistic is the Westerner's vision of the other world! And how puny and vulgar. This is true even of Dante and Swedenborg . . ." Of himself he wrote that same year: "I believe that the classics of the East, especially the Buddhist scriptures, are the supreme works of literature in the world. I revere the sutras not for their religious teachings but as literary visions . . . I have received the baptism of modern Western literature and I have myself imitated it, but basically I am an oriental, and . . . I have never lost sight of my bearings" (tr. Donald Keene).

Perhaps his nagging infatuation with Western literature's notion of size and self-containment was the residual effect of this baptism. But the "hope" of creating a universe was never quite as compelling as the desire to emulate and celebrate one. The profundity of this orientalism and the allure of its vision, in both literary (The Tale of Genji) and Buddhist canonical texts, provided Kawabata with his greatest inspiration, and palm-of-the-hand stories were the most pliant medium for this inspiration.

J. Thomas rimer, in the work cited earlier, furnishes a valuable gloss on the traditional virtues of Japanese literature. One of these virtues, yugen, "sometimes defined as 'mystery and depth' . . . is an elusive one, yet of central importance in the history of Japanese aesthetics. Shotetsu, a medieval poet and critic, defined yugen as 'feelings that cannot be put into words, for example the effect of the moon veiled by a wisp of cloud or of scarlet mountain foliage enshrouded in autumnal haze.' Such a definition might suggest the beauty of overtones, but the meaning of yugen goes deeper still. . . the term suggests a transcendental beauty behind the surface that exists on another plane of reality to which the work of art may help to lead the reader."

The concept of yugen is unmistakable in all of Kawabata's work, but it flowers most lavishly in the atmosphere of the palm-of-the-hand story.

In January 1972, Kawabata put his 1937 book Snow Country through the alembic of yugen, and produced "Gleanings from Snow Country," distilling an exquisite novel into a palm-sized story of astonishing, concentrated beauty. The dilettante Shimamura, in the train that is returning him to the mountain hot-spring inn and the geisha, called Komako in the novel but simply "the woman" in the palm-sized rewriting, is sharing a compartment with "the girl," (here again, Yoko in the original). The sun has set, and the darkness outside has made Shimamura's adjacent window into a transparent mirror. He gazes at the reflection of the girl.

The evening scene flowed in the depths of the mirror. The mirror itself and the objects reflected in it moved like a double-exposed motion picture, with no connection between the actors and the scene. Morover, as the actor, with mutable transparency, and the scene, with its misty flow—as the two fused together, they depicted an unearthly world of symbols. Especially when the lights in the fields and mountains shined in the middle of the girl's face, his heart fluttered with the inexpressible beauty . . .

Then a light burned in the middle of her face; the reflected image was not strong enough to eliminate the light from outside, and the light did not obliterate the reflection. So the light drifted across the girl's face, but it did nothing to illuminate or brighten her. It was a cold, distant light. As it shined about her pupil—in other words, in the instant when the light and the girl's eye were superimposed—her eye was transformed into a beautiful, bewitching, glowing insect that floated on the waves of the night darkness.

The balance of the tale, about eight pages, observes several episodes between Shimamura and "the woman," which Kawabata condensed and isolated, and which are busy with darkness, cold, and reflections, until finally, at story's end:

Shimamura looked toward [the woman], then shrank back. The depths of the mirror reflected the white snow. And the woman's red cheeks floated amid the snow. The pure, clean beauty was inexpressible.

Was the sun about to rise? The brilliance of the snow in the mirror increased as if it were burning cold. And with it the purple-black luster of the woman's hair in the mirror grew deeper.

The story brings not only Snow Country but all of his art into sharpest focus, and is a near-perfect rendering of yugen. Possibly even Kawabata understood, with "Gleanings from Snow Country," that he had epitomized his life in art. Three months later, after a day of working over a manuscript, Kawabata retired to an apartment where he often wrote, that overlooked the sea, and asphyxiated himself. He was 72. There was no reason, no explanation, and no note, from this artist who, as Donald Keene writes, "said that he neither admired nor could sympathize with suicide." What remained were simply articles of yugen: a hose for inhaling gas, the body of Japan's Nobel laureate, and an oeuvre of exquisite prose. Perhaps this transcendence, as concise and ambiguous as a palm-of-the-hand story, was simply part of Kawabata's ongoing exploration of the vastness of the asymmetrical garden.