A review of Yasunari Kawabata’s (1954/trans.1974) novella The Lake

 A review of Yasunari Kawabata’s (1954/trans.1974) novella The Lake

 

Having stumbled on a reference of Kawabata being a Zen Buddhist (of sorts) and Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, I finally read The Lake which happened to be in my bookshelf. In retrospect, after also reading Kawabata’s very perceptive Nobel Prize lecture that mainly deals with Japanese Zen Buddhism – a topic I used to be quite interested in – I should have paid attention to the plaudits on the back cover which noted that while his ‘other’ work is ‘delicate and understated’ this novella will ‘surprise’ the reader ‘and perhaps even be shocked by the brutal sensuality of some of the scenes’. I would have been surprised by the phrase ‘brutal sensuality’ which seems an oxymoron. 

 

So, when reading the story unencumbered by the knowledge above, one increasingly gets the impression that this a Japanese version of Lolita – written only a year later (maybe Nabokov was inspired by The Lake), especially as both share the theme of the middle-aged teacher having an affair with the young school student. Given the notoriety of Lolita, it is perhaps no surprise that the quick reviews on the back cover of The Lake sound tantalizing warnings like ‘master of the erotic’ or ‘the mysterious relation between beauty and evil’. On the surface one can of course invoke the base mentality of misguided, if not criminal obsession of the older male with the young, underage female. Gimpei, the unfortunate protagonist may well be an understudy of Kawabata’s weird fantasies but as an obvious master of storytelling, we are drawn into an intricate web of the most unlikely scenarios happening before our eyes, in both urban and rural Japan – before and after WWII. Let’s begin with the ending: after having somewhat unsuccessfully stalked one of his young victims during a firefly festival, Gimpei, after wandering around Tokyo’s Uneo underground station (the vagrants living there are a class below that of Gimpei’s, as are prostitutes), emerges in the surrounding streets and follows a not so young woman wearing gumboots although it is not raining – which intrigues him no end. He engages her and buys her a few drinks at a local bar until she is quite drunk and ready to take him to her place. Having told him that she has a daughter, he leaves her standing on the street:

 

            “If your child is waiting for you, go home”, he said and left her.

 

She throws stones at him and hits his ankle. When he gets home, he pulls off his socks and ‘his ankle had turned faintly red’. The End. Of course, we know by now that Gimpei is also obsessed with his ‘ugly feet’, so it is a fitting ending. 

 

One of the more bizarre stories within the story is the account of Gimpei as a university student frequenting various brothels with the consequence that one day a baby is left at his lodgings – for Gimpei by Gimpei. He and his friend return the baby to the prostitute’s alley. Years later when crawling through a ditch to stalk a young girl he has visions of crawling over a baby ghost. The psychoanalyst reader will interpret this as the unbearable guilt that Gimpei carries in his head. 

 

Gimpei’s – or shall we say Kawabata’s - sexual fantasies seem to be fixated on the breasts of his victims and it never quite clear if the sexual relations with his former school student went further than that. At one stage he takes Hisako’s eyelid between his lips. What kind of gesture is this? At another point Gimpei threatens Hisako’s friend:

 

            “… I’m not above hitting or kicking a woman, you know.”

 

There are no scenes in the novella of obvious violence, sexual or otherwise. Mostly we see Gimpei as a less than threatening but more of a pathetic, self-loathing creature, even vaguely sympathetic as an aimless wanderer whose life has no value. Do adolescent girls fall for such characters as Hisako does? I doubt it. That students have crushes on their teachers is nothing new but never as the beauty and the beast – generally it is a relationship between two beauties. When I was in high school in Germany, the young, very good-looking German teacher seduced one of the female students in my class – or was it the other way round? The student, all her sweet seventeen, was of course a beauty too. In those days the power imbalance between student and teacher was not an issue and since nobody from the school administration had noticed, the affair never came to light. However, the idea of Gimpei, the weird, ugly middle-aged teacher seducing his beautiful student is immediately repulsive, even though elements of true love being blind seem to intrude. 

 

In contrast and in true Zen tradition, Kawabata’s descriptions of nature – even in urban settings – are fabulously evocative, be it the fireflies, the gingko trees or the skies appearing in blue and pink hues. Human nature may be both crass and beautiful at times but Japan as the ultimate Zen Garden has no equal beauty. Not that Zen is ever mentioned here. That Kawabata was a conflicted writer is not difficult to find out – his suicide notwithstanding. There is a photograph of Kawabata with his wife and her sister on either side of him – on Wikipedia – with his wife looking glum but her sister looking radiant. What is going on there? Kawabata’s treatment of human relations in The Lake are a dream scenario for the Freudian psychoanalyst – the complexes men and women suffer from, unknown to the men and women in question.

 

There is the famous Zen story of the Zen Master who meets a prostitute who asks him to marry her, to get out of prostitution. He does so without a second thought. Kawabata’s protagonist doesn’t rise to the occasion, presumably because he lacks enlightenment – Satori. Should we therefor ask Kawabata’s ghost, à la Derrida, if we can forgive the unforgivable?