First Snow on Fuji

First Snow on Fuji

by Yasunari Kawabata
First Snow on Fuji

First Snow on Fuji

by Yasunari Kawabata

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not-knowing. Kawabata lets us slide into the lives of people who have been shattered by war, loss, and longing. These stories are beautiful and melancholy, filled with Kawabata's unerring vision of human psychology. First Snow on Fuji was originally published in Japan in 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize. Kawabata selected the stories for this collection himself, and the result is a stunning assembly of disparate moods and genres. This new edition is the first to be published in English.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781582431055
Publisher: Catapult
Publication date: 10/12/2000
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 244
Sales rank: 681,205
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

Read an Excerpt

This
Country,
That
Country


* * *


   1.


Takako read "This Country, That Country" in the Sankei Daily Times a second and even a third time on the eve of Culture Day, which is to say on November second. The column printed curious and interesting articles about occurrences abroad, more like stories or seeds of stories than hard news.

    The previous day's edition had given rather extensive coverage to an announcement made by England's Princess Margaret, in which she had said that she would not marry Group Captain Townshend after all. It was only natural that one of the stories in today's "This Country, That Country" should concern the princess's love affair:

    One often comes across mounds of stones in the Scottish highlands. In the past, these mounds were erected in memory of heroes who fell in battle, but now it's said that lovers who add stones to these mounds achieve "eternal love." Four years ago, at a time when Princess Margaret and Group Captain Townshend were both staying in Balmoral, they placed a stone on a mound located in the middle of an overgrown field some three miles outside of town, swore their love for one another, and by this act leapt instantly into fame. The princess's love affair has now ended.

    There was a picture of the mound at the end of the article. Its size could be estimated from the size of the people who stood around it—the pile itself was almost as tall as a man, and the individual stones that formed it were a good deallarger than a person's head. A few stones were as wide across as a person's shoulders.

    Of course it was impossible to tell which of the stones the princess and the group captain had placed on the pile, but none looked as though the princess could have lifted it alone. She and Group Captain Townshend must have lifted the stone together, and even so it must have been heavy.

    Gazing at the photograph, Takako tried to imagine the princess as she would have looked hoisting a stone onto the mound with the group captain, but the image that came was simply an image. Takako felt no connection to it. Her reading of the articles in the previous day's paper had left her feeling sorry for the princess, who had after all been forced by church law and by certain customs of the English royal family to abandon her love, but that feeling was now gone. In some ways yesterday's empathy itself seemed like a foreign story.

    Takako was unable to read one of the other stories in "This Country, That Country" with so much detachment, however. The story described two actual cases of "spouse swapping."

    The first incident had occurred in Sweden. Two married couples, the Polsens and the Petersons, lived in adjacent apartments in a single building in Egresund, a town near Stockholm. Mr. Polsen and Mr. Peterson were friends of long standing, and they and their wives had grown so close that they lived essentially as a single family. Then, on the twenty-ninth (the article ran on November second, so it must have been October twenty-ninth), the two husbands swapped wives—or to look at it from the other point of view, the wives swapped husbands. In short, the couples were divorced and remarried simultaneously. Neither the Petersons nor the Polsens are at all worried about the shock they've given the world, and all four of them are getting along as well as ever, it was reported.

    "There are so many marriages that just aren't happy, where the couple would be better off getting divorced," Peterson stated. "There's really nothing strange about our marrying each other's wives. In the end it seemed it'd be better for the children—that's basically why we did it."

    The Petersons have one child, the Polsens two infants. All three children accompanied their respective mothers when they moved, each into the apartment next door.

    Another swap took place in the United States in the state of Wisconsin, where on the twenty-eighth (probably the twenty-eighth of October) a spouse-swapping ceremony was held. Forty-three-year-old Mr. Pierce and twenty-nine-year-old Mrs. Pierce married thirty-two-year-old Mrs. Pemis and thirty-two-year-old Mr. Pemis, respectively. The two weddings were held consecutively, and each couple helped out at the other's ceremony.

    The couples were interviewed two days later, on the thirtieth.

    "All of us, our children too—we're all extremely pleased."

    Each family has three children. As in Sweden, the children followed their mothers, who were the ones to move, though here too it was hardly a "move" at all: the couples live in facing houses, on opposite sides of the same street.

    The comedy of the (very likely) middle-class spouse-swappers affected Takako more powerfully than the tragedy of the princess and her mound of stones because it related directly to her own life.

    Or could it be that the spouse-swappers' story was the tragedy, and not the story of the princess's love? After all, the article might not have conveyed the spouse-swappers' true feelings, or maybe they hadn't told the reporters what they really felt.

    Was it really possible that the children—living right next door to their former apartments, across the street from their old houses—would find the father-swap "a pleasure?" Was it really "better for the children?"

    Takako couldn't believe it.

    Spouse-swapping wasn't the kind of thing a person could do ordinarily, of course—certainly anyone predisposed to tragedy would have a hard time going through with it. To think that all four people, two married couples, had felt the same way—it must be incredibly rare. Indeed, it was precisely because it was so rare that the topic had been taken up as international news in the first place, and why the Japanese newspaper had chosen the story for "This Country, That Country."

    The eight Swedes and Americans must have been either frivolous pleasure-seekers or lawless rebels—it was inconceivable that they had thought very deeply about what they were doing—and they must have exchanged spouses in the spirit of comedy. Takako was sure this was the case.

    Even so, there was no denying that something utterly improbable had happened, really happened, twice within the past three or four days—even if it had happened in distant countries.

    Takako, twenty-nine, was certainly well aware that things one might assume to be impossible sometimes do happen in the world. People can bring themselves to do anything at all, for any reason whatsoever. You can never tell what a person might do.

    But she could never do it herself. She never would.

    "I suppose all you really need are four people who feel the same way about it—four people out of an uncountable number—and then it's possible, isn't it?" she muttered, forcing herself to laugh.

    No, it wasn't amazing. It would cause no very terrible inconvenience, it wasn't a crime. And yet "all you really need" was not something one could honestly say.

    Takako decided that it would be best not to show the article to her husband, Hirata.

    Hirata had skimmed the newspaper before he left that morning—it was unlikely that he would look through it again, or that if he did he would happen across "This Country, That Country." Even supposing that he did read the column, he'd probably think it was just an amusing topic, a nice little snippet of a story. He'd probably be more interested in the story about Princess Margaret and Group Captain Townshend, the story of the mound of stones.

    Still, Takako decided to put the newspaper away somewhere where he wouldn't see it.


   2.


Impatiently, Takako tried to jam the newspaper that contained the story in near the bottom of the stack she was making in the corner of the closet, but she couldn't make it go in.

    She pictured herself squatting there, disgracefully posed, and suddenly found herself besieged by sinful thoughts.

    Hiding the newspaper was not her only sin.

    Sliding the closet door shut and turning toward the room, Takako was startled by the vivid shadow of a tree on the paper-paneled door. A bright autumn sun was shining outside.

    She went out into the garden.

    The shadow she had seen was being cast by a holly. The tree was larger than most hollies and was the only one in their garden that really looked like a tree.

    The holly was speckled with tiny white flowers. Though it was plainly visible from the sitting room, Takako couldn't remember when the flowers had started to bloom. It was strange that she couldn't remember.

    And now the flowers were falling—the black earth in the tree's shadow looked white.

    Takako picked up three or four of the small flowers and held them in the palm of her hand. Each blossom had four round, softly curved petals. The stamens were long.

    Hirata might have noticed the flowers on the holly, but of course he would know nothing at all of the delicate form of the individual blossoms. So far neither Takako nor Hirata had mentioned the flowers this autumn.

    Hearing the swish of kumazasa bamboo in the garden of the house next door, Takako called out, "Ricky, Ricky!"

    A brown mutt put its head through a hole in the bottom of the bamboo fence. Takako could see from the movements of his head that the dog was vigorously wagging his tail, but he stayed right where he was and didn't come through to their garden.

    "Ricky, has Mr. Chiba gone out?"

    Takako spoke so that Chiba would hear if he were home.

    Chiba had named Ricky after the pro-wrestler Rikidosan, of course—his nickname was "Ricky."

    "I bet Rikidosan would be angry if he found out," Takako had once said to Chiba.

    "I doubt if he ever will. And even if he did, he'd probably just take it as a sign of his popularity and laugh it off. There really aren't many good names for dogs, plus he's a male, and he's a guard dog, so don't you think it's right for him to be named after someone strong? Though once when I was walking in town I heard someone holler out `Ricky, Ricky!' and when I looked it was this little terrier. Well, I thought, so other people are using it, too—trendy people."

    "It's a nice name. It has a nice sound."

    "You must have had the same experience yourself. You hear someone call out `Takako' somewhere and you spin around...."

    "Yes. There aren't too many names for women, either."

    "Ricky's neck, the way it's so long ... it kind of looks like yours. At least I think so."

    "Are you saying that this dog looks like me?"

    Takako thought she might laugh, but she didn't. She wasn't angry—it wasn't that, exactly. But to think that Chiba had looked at his pet dog's neck, thinking of hers! Her cheeks reddened.

    Takako knew that her neck was slimmer and more shapely than those of most Japanese women—her friends had pointed this out to her since the time she was in grade school. Her neck had remained beautiful even after her marriage, never growing fleshy or unpleasant to look at. Hirata was also aware of the beauty of her neck. He sometimes pushed her jaw upward with his forehead and kissed it. Takako was so used to this that it no longer even tickled her.

    Yet whenever young Fujiki brushed her neck with his lips, Takako felt so ticklish that she leapt up and leaned away, shrieking.

    This difference surprised Takako, even frightened her. It was hard for her to believe that she responded to Fujiki the way she did solely as a result of his shyness, the softness with which he touched his lips to her neck.

    "Ricky, come here."

    Takako called the dog again. But he kept standing there, his head and neck poking through the bamboo fence.

    The fence was very old—it had been built before Takako's arrival at the house. Thick pieces of bamboo had been split in half and lined up with their insides facing the Hiratas' side, a fact that suggested it was someone from the Chibas' house who had built it. The akebi vine that had climbed the bamboo on the Chibas' side sometimes dropped its shriveled berries into the Hiratas' garden.

    Chiba had still been single when Takako arrived as Hirata's bride. He was living with his mother and his younger sister, and there had been a pretty maid. The sister married and moved out soon after Takako arrived. Two years later Chiba's mother died.

    The Hiratas were invited to the sister's wedding reception, and they had also attended the mother's funeral. And Chiba had been at the Hiratas' wedding reception, although Takako, the bride, had not seen him.

    Two or three days after the Hiratas returned from their honeymoon—it was a Sunday—Chiba had called down from the second floor of his house,

    "Hirata, Hirata."

    "Yes?"

    Takako walked out into the hall. It was the first time she had heard the name "Hirata" called like that, from a distance, and she'd taken it to refer to herself. It was also the first time she saw her neighbor's face—Chiba's face.

    Chiba seemed somewhat taken aback to see her come out.

    "Oh—I'm sorry to be shouting down at you like that.... I've had a pheasant sent up from the country, and I thought I'd send it over as a wedding present. I mean, if you'd like it.... "

    "Well—yes."

    Then Takako's face became red and she went back inside, making a gesture as if to say, wait a moment please! There was probably no need for her to ask her husband, since Chiba had said he would give it to them, yet ...

    Takako's chest was pounding. Chiba's voice was ringing inside her.

    Hirata was delighted with the message she brought.

(Continues...)

Table of Contents

Translator's Notevii
This Country, That Country1
A Row of Trees52
Nature71
Raindrops95
Chrysanthemum in the Rock106
First Snow on Fuji124
Silence153
Her Husband Didn't174
Yumiura187
The Boat-Women200
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