THE CAMELLIA
by Kawabata Yasunari
Editor-translator’s biographical notes: In 1968, during the celebration of the Meiji Centennial, Kawabata Yasunari became the first Japanese Nobel laureate in literature. The citation says that he was given the award “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expressed the essence of the Japanese mind.” A man who prized solitude, who indeed had a solitary, faraway look even in the midst of throngs, Kawabata had long before commented on the emptiness of fame; yet he dutifully attended the innumerable ceremonies, parties, and functions which were held in his honor. After returning from Stockholm he made several more trips abroad, to lecture or to attend writers’ conferences; in 1971 he campaigned actively for a friend who was running for Governor of Tokyo. He committed suicide alone in his studio near Kamakura in April, 1972, leaving no note or explanation.
Kawabata Yasunari was born in Osaka in 1899. He lost his parents while still an infant; his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward; he was fourteen at the death of his grandfather, with whom he had lived alone since the age of seven. After that he lived in a middle-school dormitory, until he left Osaka to attend the elite First Higher School in Tokyo. His literary career was under way before he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. Soon his reputation was established by the tiny vignettes to which he gave the name tanagokoro no shosetsu (“palm-of-the-hand stories”), and by a wistful autobiographical tale, The Izu Dancer (Izu no odoriko, 1926, tr. 1955).
None of Kawabata’s major novels was completed until after World War II. His long works took shape very slowly, one fragmentary episode being added to another from time to time, as if by a leisurely process of free association. Thus, Snow Country (Yukiguni, tr. 1956) began as a short story. The material stretched over into a second installment, published the same month (January, 1935) in a magazine with a later deadline. Further chapters were added—two more toward the end of the year, two in 1936, and so on—until after many extensions and revisions a presumably final verison was completed in 1947. A more tenuous character study, Thousand Cranes (Sembazuru, tr. 1958), was published as a book in 1951, but further episodes continued to appear sporadically in succeeding years. Instead of analyzing his characters at length or showing them in sustained dramatic scenes, Kawabata prefers to hint at their inner lives by noting gestures, bits of startling dialogue, momentary feelings. The emphasis is on the immediate moment, with its memoires and desires. Such moments, strung together with the vibrant irrational continuity of the traditional Japanese genere of linked verse (renga), the historical precursor of the haiku, follow one anotehr in an impressionistic, meandering manner, which conveys a keen anwareness of emotional states and of the natural world.
Kawabata wrote well over a hundred very short stories—each only a few pages—and once said that the "tanagokoro no shosetsu" were his favorite works. Most of them were written while he was in his twenties. They were his “youthful poetry.” “Most literary men write poetry when they are young, but I wrote these vignettes instead.” Later he found some of them repellent. “I can’t help feeling antipathy toward the self in them.” Still, he continued writing tanagokoro no shosetsu, publishing some two dozen during his most productive postwar years. Within these brief tales may be found not only the familiar elements of Kawabata’s wider fictional world—the drifting constellations of human relationships, the recurrent beauties of nature—but also the somber themes of his later masterpiece The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto, 1954, tr. 1970): awareness of a new era, of change and loss, and a quiet, bittersweet resignation to solitude, old age, and approaching death.
Site Editor’s note:
“The Camellia” ("Sazanka"), a palm-of-the hand story, cleared censorship and was published in 1946. However, another short story submitted that year to a prominent magazine, "Bungei shunjū," suffered a few cuts owing to uncomplimentary references to Japanese women accompanied by foreign men (obviously Occupation solderis). Soon after the war, Kawabata became actively engaged in publishing a literary magazine in Kamakura and became better known to Japanese readers. Following his election in 1947 as president of the Japan PEN club, he was, in a sense, discovered as a modern Japanese author by members of the Occupation, and his fiction would be among the first works chosen for translation and publication in the United States in the 1950s and after. At one point, Kawabata expressed interest in writing an atomic bomb story but never followed through. He did write a novel in the mid-1950s, as yet untranslated, which incorporated the theme of the bar and brothel culture surrounding U.S. bases in Japan. Among other works lesser known by Kawabata’s overseas readers are travel notes on wartime Manchuria. In “Camellia,” told from the point of view of an older married man, the reader will find references to wartime neighborhood associations (tonarigumi), birth and death, homefront bombing, pessimism countered by hope, and a father-daughter relationship. There is also a sly reference to the new Constitution (promulgated in November 1946) and girl babies amidst a postwar baby boom. All of this, skillfully interwoven within a slight palm-of-the-hand story.
In this, the second autumn since the War, there have been four childbirths in my neighborhood of ten households.
The oldest of the mothers, also the most prolific, had twins. They were both girls, but one died two weeks later. The mother had so much milk that she gave some to the child in the house next door, which had its first girl, after two boys. I was asked to name the girl, and I chose the name Kazuko. Kazuko could conceivably be numbered among difficult and irregular readings for the character with which it is written, and I certainly did not want to complicate the girl's life; but I chose the name because that character is the one with which "peace" is written.
The twins were both girls and four of the five children born in the neighborhood were girls. People laughed and said that we were seeing the results of the new constitution, and in the joke too I felt peace.
Probably it was mere chance that four-fifths of the children were girls, and probably my neighborhood association was unusually prolific; but there was a good harvest of babies that autumn the country over. It was, of course, a gift of peace. The birth rate had fallen during the War, and now it soared, most naturally, since young husbands had come home from the War. Yet it was not only in the families of returned soldiers that babies were born. There were babies as well in houses whose fathers had stayed at home. There were rather astonishing births to middle-aged parents. The sense of security produced by the end of the War had in turn produced children.
Nothing showed peace in more concrete form. It was the most personal and instinctive of phenomena, quite indifferent to defeat and deprivation and population problems. It was like the bursting forth of an obstructed spring, like the sprouting of withered grass. We may rejoice if congratulations are in order for revival and liberation. There is also an element of the animal in it all, something to make us a little sorry for the race.
No doubt the babies helped their parents forget the weariness of war. For me, now fifty, the end of the War did not bring children. An aging marriage had only become blander during the War years, and habits did not change with the return of peace.
I awoke from the War to find that the evening of life was approaching. I told myself that it should not be so, but the defeat brought physical and spiritual debilitation. It was as if our country and our time had withered, and as if, in quiet solitude, I were gazing from another world upon the glow of life.
The mother of the lone boy was the youngest of the four mothers. Though she looked sturdy enough, a delicate frame made the delivery a slow one. It was said that on the second day, incapable of urinating through a tube, she got up. It was her first child, though she had had a miscarriage.
My sixteen-year-old daughter was much interested in all these babies. She visited the families with whom she felt at home, and talked of them. When she would suddenly run out of the house it would be to go see a baby. A sudden urge seemed to take her.
"Mrs. Shimamura says the other baby has come back," she said one day, sitting down beside me. "Do you think it has?"
"No."
"Oh?"
She looked disappointed. Not so much disappointed, perhaps, as short of breath after the run home. I was uncertain. Perhaps I had been wrong in my quick denial.
"You've been to see the Shimamura baby again?" I asked quietly.
She nodded.
"Is it all that pretty?"
"It's too early to tell."
"Oh?"
"Mrs. Shimamura came in while twas with it. She said it was the other baby back again. She had another baby, you remember? I suppose that is what she was talking about."
"I wonder." My answer was vague, though again I leaned in the direction of denial. "I should imagine that a mother would feel that way. But I wonder. We don't even know whether the other was a boy or a girl."
"That's true." She nodded briefly.
Though I still felt uneasy, she did not seem to take the matter very seriously, and that was the end of it. Since the miscarriage had been in the sixth month, perhaps it had after all been possible to tell the sex of the baby; but I said no more.
Both the Shimamuras were saying the earlier baby had come back-or so I heard from someone in the neighborhood.
I had thought it a rather morbid notion, but changed my mind. Such beliefs had in the past been common and seemed healthy enough. Nor had they died out in our own day. Perhaps the Shimamuras felt a certainty none of the rest of us could have that the other baby had been reborn. There could be no doubt, even if it was no more than sentimentality, that it brought comfort and happiness. The earlier baby had been the result of a three-days' leave when Shimamura's unit was being transferred. He had been away when the miscarriage occurred, and the second baby came upwards of a year after his return. There was sorrow and compensation.
My daughter had referred to "the other baby" as if it were a finished human being, but of course no one else treated it as such. Probably only the Shimamuras thought of it as if it had lived. I could not myself say whether or not it had. It was in the womb and that was all. It did not know sunlight and perhaps it had no soul. But there is little to choose among us, and perhaps it had the purest and happiest life of all. There was in any event something, some urge to live.
No one, of course, could argue that this child and the other had come from the same cells. Nor can we recognize with certainty a relationship between the miscarriage and the pregnancy. We have no way of knowing where it comes from, the urge to life. We would be hard put even to say whether earlier life and later stand in isolation, or whether all life is part of a flow. Reason tells us that the notion of the rebirth of the first child, the dead child, is unscientific, and that is all. It is as difficult to find evidence that there is not rebirth as that there is.
I felt somehow in sympathy with the Shimamuras, and somehow too in sympathy with the miscarried baby, until then nothing to me. I felt as if it had lived.
Being a sort who insisted on getting up the second day after delivery, Mrs. Shimamura would be someone who liked tidiness and pretty things. My daughter would go to her with problems about knitting and the crafts she was learning in school. Until relatives had taken refuge from the Tokyo bombings, Mrs. Shimamura had lived alone with her mother, and my daughter evidently felt comfortable with them. I was charged with fire prevention for the neighborhood association and I worried rather a lot about the old mother and the pregnant daughter whose husband was off at war.
I had been made fire marshal because I alone of the men in the neighborhood was at home in the daytime. Perhaps I was qualified too because, being of a timid nature, I did not make demands on people. I could read and write the night watch away, and it was my policy not to disturb people's sleep. I went my rounds and awakened no one, and fortunately in Kamakura that was enough.
One evening when the plums were in bloom a light seemed to be coming from the Shimamura kitchen. As I tried to look over the gate my walking stick fell inside. I meant to go for it the next day, but did not, thinking that an Occidental walking stick dropped in the night behind a house occupied only by women might seem suggestive.
Mrs. Shimamura brought it back the next afternoon. She called my daughter to the gate.
"Your father dropped it when he was doing the rounds last night." "Really? Where?"
"Inside our back gate."
"Very careless of him."
"It must have been dark."
It was in a mountain valley behind Kamakura. When there was an air-raid alarm I would be the first to take refuge. When I had climbed to the cave that was our shelter, I would look down over the neighborhood.
There had been an attack of carrier planes from early in the morning. There was a great roaring overhead, and there was shooting.
"Be careful, Mrs. Shimamura," I called, going a few steps from the cave. "The birds, the little birds. See how frightened they are."
There were two or three little birds in a large plum tree. They were trying to fly from branch to branch, but, in a confusion of wings, were making no progress. The wings were like little spasms in the narrow space enclosed by the branches. Even when the birds came to a branch they seemed unable to take hold, but beat their wings and seemed about to fall feet forward over the branch. From the cave, Mrs. Shimamura looked on at the quivering of the birds. Her knees tight in her arms, she was looking up at them.
Something fell with a sharp report into the bamboo thicket beside us. With my feelings of sympathy at the story of the reborn Shimamura child came the memory of the quivering birds. Mrs. Shimamura had been carrying the first child at the time.
The second child was safely delivered.
There were many miscarriages during the War, and few births. There were many female disorders. Now, this autumn, there were four births in ten houses.
As I walked with my daughter down the lane beside the Shimamura house, I saw that a camellia at the hedge was coming into bloom. I am fond of the autumn camellia, perhaps because of its season.
Suddenly sad for all the children who were denied sunlight because of the War, I was sad too for the life that had gone from me during the War. I wondered if it would be reborn into something somewhere.
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Reference
Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Film, and Other Writing Since 1945. Ed. Howard Hibbett. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, pp. 295-297.
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