April 16, 1972 at 2:45 p.m., Kamakura. Yasunari Kawabata left the house quietly.
That night, Kawabata's body was found in the studio. He lay in the quilt, with a gas pipe in his mouth and whiskey next to him. No suicide note.
That was what happened 17 months after Yukio Mishima committed suicide. It has only been 41 months since Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature and became a world-recognized giant of Japanese literature.
Fifty years on earth is like a dream and an illusion. At that time, Kawabata was the premier spokesperson for Japanese literature. When people think of Japanese writers today, the first thing that comes to mind is Haruki Murakami, who has been repeatedly kidnapped and consumed by people as the "runner" of the Nobel Prize, or keigo Higashino, a popular mystery novelist. Their works are more contemporary and have a deep relationship with the Japanese literary tradition. But even among the pure literary writers of the Showa period, it is more often talked about by Osamu Dazai, who is "out of character", Yukio Mishima, who is "beautiful and violent", and even Junichiro Tanizaki, who is "the devil of beauty".
In contrast, Yasunari Kawabata is actually one who can better represent the japanese cultural character and aesthetic style, but in the literary reading that has become less and less popular in contemporary readers, he is being marginalized and becoming an "old writer" who has passed away. Is Yasunari Kawabata out of date?
Yasunari Kawabata
Kawabata is also a Japanese film history
Although the art of cinema is also in decline today, and its influence is not the same as that of the past, for most pure literary authors, film and television adaptations are still the needs of the audience for the contemporary value of the work, or have become a classic proof of the times.
Yasunari Kawabata is an author whose works are well suited to visualization.
In 1984, the Japanese drama "Blood Doubt" was introduced and broadcast by CCTV, starring Momoe Yamaguchi, who became a national idol. Yamaguchi Momoe and Yasunari Kawabata have an indissoluble relationship: at the age of 15, she debuted on the big screen with Kawabata's early "The Dancer of Izu", and at the age of 21, she starred in Kawabata's late masterpiece "Ancient Capital". This was Kawabata's "out of the loop" moment: Kawabata reading in China in the 1980s had a pop imprint beyond the pursuit of Nobel Prize writers.
Yamaguchi's "The Dancing Girl of Izu" is the sixth-degree image rewrite of this short story. Beginning with Tanaka Akiyo in 1933, several generations of legendary Japanese actresses have interpreted the little dancer Kaoru Izu. Kawabata's other masterpieces, such as "Ancient Capital", "Snow Country", and "Thousand Cranes", have also been projected on the screen several times, and it can be said that films adapted from Kawabata's works are superior to other Showa masters such as Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki, or Osamu Dazai, both in quantity and quality.
Stills from Yamaguchi's version of "The Dancing Girl of Izu"
In fact, adaptation is not the only way Kawabata has participated in the history of Japanese cinema. Kawabata has a deeper relationship with Japanese cinema.
In 1926, the year Izu's Dancing Girl was published, Kawabata, who was still a newcomer writer, wrote a screenplay for Sadasuke Igusa's film "Crazy Page". This film fully embodies the artistic pursuit of Kawabata's early "New Sensations", applying the techniques of expressionism to the extreme, avant-garde and crazy, and is one of the most shocking works in the early experimental works of world cinema. Through the images, we can also feel the youthful talent of Kawabata. He was also involved in the actual filming, and the use of Noh masks in the closing paragraph was Kawabata's idea. He personally traveled all over Kyoto to buy four masks.
Poster for the movie "A Page of Madness"
Naruse has worked with Kawabata many times. He has successively adapted Kawabata's "Maiden Heart", "Maihime" and "Sound of the Mountain" to the screen, and together with Kawabata, he has adapted Fumiko Hayashi's unfinished work "Rice". Naruse focuses on telling the story of women's living conditions and emotional tragedies, and is very good at using rich camera movements and meticulous short-shot clips to portray the subtle changes in women's hearts and render the depression and depression of emotions. This coincides with Kawabata, who excels at dyeing women's beauty and sorrow, confusion, and fascination in fragments. This also makes the two people not present a similar atmosphere of confidant in many texts that do not exist in the relationship between the adaptation and the original work.
Many people regret that Ozu Yasujiro did not adapt Kawabata's works in his lifetime, but in fact, Ozu also communicated with Kawabata's atmosphere very early. In his diary dated April 28, 1933, Ozu wrote: "On the line that Yasunari Kawabata's dancers walked, I felt an inexplicable sense of nostalgia for the streets here. There is something in common that comforts us in this journey. This common thing may be called "material sorrow" in Japanese aesthetics. The Zen flavor permeated in Ozu's late works and the large "none" character on the tombstone are another confirmation of the two people's realm.
Naruse and Ozu were representatives of Japan's postwar film tradition, while the rebellious Japanese New Wave film writers still favored Kawabata. Masahiro Shinoda's "Beauty and Sorrow" achieves a distinct writing of the film's authorship on the premise of faithful to the original work, while Yoshida's "Woman's Lake" Antonioni's bold and distinctive image style seems to be a distant echo of the avant-garde exploration of "Crazy Page".
From the 1920s to the 1970s, Yasunari Kawabata personally participated in the most glorious era of Japanese cinema, nourishing many film creators, and these masterpieces of film history in turn became proof of the literary quality of Kawabata's works.
It was also around the time of Kawabata's death that the film industry was in turmoil under the impact of television. One symptom is that in 1971, Akira Kurosawa's suicide attempt: even the "movie emperor" was in the predicament of having no film to make. After Yamaguchi's "Ancient Capital", Kawabata's film and television adaptations were cold, and there were no more works that had a wide impact. In addition, Kawabata's video texts of the Heisei period often overhauled the original work. For example, in 2016, Saito Isamu's "Ancient Capital" not only moved the background of the times to the contemporary, but also added daughters to the sisters in the original work, becoming a new story of two groups of mothers and women crossing each other. The latest adaptation is 2022 Kazuki Watanabe's "Snow Country", which completely ignores Kawabata's delicate depiction of the terroir of the snow country, radically encloses the original story into a puzzle structure, and reinterprets the relationship between the three protagonists.
Stills from Isamu Saito's version of "Ancient Capital"
The extent to which film and television adaptations should respect the original work is a complex issue that varies from person to person to book. Leaving this issue aside, Kawabata's contemporary adaptations fall into a paradox: the creators tend to rewrite the original to make the text more relevant to contemporary life and more entertaining; but these offensive attempts themselves run counter to Kawabata's traditional, classical aesthetic characteristics, and the combination of the two is not the same.
Just like the Heisei period, the sun shadow and the Showa shadow temperament are completely different. In the changing times, Kawabata, once the most suitable national writer for visualization, seems to have become out of date and has become the most difficult author to successfully adapt.
In contrast, Osamu Dazai, a writer who had almost never been "electrocuted" during the Showa period, became Heisei's new favorite for images. "Human Disqualification" has been presented several times in the form of movies, episodes or animations, and has also produced a well-known film such as "The Wife of Wei Yong". Photographer Shikazu Kawa also brought Dazai's affair between different women to the screen. In fact, Osamu Dazai has become the protagonist of the anime series "Wenhao Wild Dog", which uses the literary terrier as a selling point and integrates several generations of Japanese literary heroes.
In "Bunhao Wild Dogs", there is still no character named "Yasunari Kawabata", although "Tanizaki" and "Wasagawa" have appeared one after another.
The two kinds of loneliness of Kawabata and Osamu Dazai
"I'm sorry to be human." Osamu Dazai is very good at writing such aphorisms. The "flag bearer of the 20th century" holds the flag in the next century, becoming the protagonist of the anime and becoming a symbol of loneliness. Modern people always regard themselves as "social animals" and "social fears", and the ubiquitous sense of loneliness has become an inescapable spiritual ordeal, and Dazaiji, who has "lost his qualifications to be a human being", will be recognized by modern people, which is inevitable.
People's loneliness cannot be measured, but it can still be compared. Compared to Dazaiji, Yasunari Kawabata is undoubtedly the lonelier one.
Kawabata was once known as a "celebrity who attended a funeral.". This is because he witnessed the death of too many relatives when he was young: his father at the age of two, his mother at the age of three, his grandmother at the age of 7, his sister at the age of 10, and his blind grandfather at the age of 15, completely orphaned. In "The Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old", Kawabata coldly records what his grandfather looked like on his sickbed when he died. The grandfather, who is unable to untie himself, painfully calls on someone around him to give him urine, which is a recurring episode in this novel. When people reach old age, their dignity is gone.
Grandfather had a high fever today, and a disgusting odor came out... I sat at my desk and read a book. He dragged a long, high-pitched moan. It was a rainy night in May. (The Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old)
Kawabata, who was sixteen years old, alone digested these echoes of aging and death.
Osamu Dazai was the opposite: born into a local family, from a wealthy family, with many brothers and sisters, and never suffered financial hardship before becoming an adult. Wealth may not be worry-free, but compared with Kawabata's youth, when there was no one to lean on, loneliness is absolutely different from relative.
Kawabata's emotional experience is also full of frustration. At the age of 20, he met Ito Hatsuyo, a waitress from a poor family, and proposed to him two years later. Standing alone, he finally found a place where he could pin his emotions. Who expected that a month later, the first generation wrote to Kawabata, saying that it was because of the unspeakable extraordinary circumstances that must be repentant. No matter what the "extraordinary circumstances", Kawabata was eventually rejected. Did Kawabata also doubt his qualifications as a human being at that time?
Yasunari Kawabata, first ito (1921)
Kawabata's later marriage was more of a compromise with reality. Kawabata rarely mentions Lady Hideko. When asked when the two would get married, Kawabata was vague. When Kawabata was in his fifties, he wrote "Mountain Tone", and the protagonist Shingo could not marry the woman he liked, so he married her sister. At the beginning of the story, Shingo is old, but he still has a hard time remembering his wife and sister. I don't know how much of it portrays Kawabata's own married life.
Compared with Kawabata, who has a dismal love history, Dazai's female relationship is excellent, and the five women he has met in his life are mostly red-faced confidants who can rely on each other for life and death, and only then do he have his legendary love death anecdotes. So why are we more likely to empathize with Dazaiji's loneliness?
Osamu Dazai named his first collection of novels "Later Years." He was 27 years old. Only people who are still young want to hurry up and grow old. Dazai's five-degree suicide is more or less related to further education, employment, and loss of love. This is the loneliness and frustration of youth. Therefore, Osamu Dazai's works are also known as eternal youth literature. He never experienced true "old age".
Kawabata once mentioned an anecdote - someone said a joke at the fiftieth birthday banquet of the painter Ishii Kashiwatei: "Ishii, you are twenty not confused, thirty is not confused, forty is not confused, fifty is not confused, I am afraid that from the moment you fall to the ground, you will not be confused." ”
Yasushi Kawabata is a person who is too early familiar with the experience of old age, and teenagers are not confused. Therefore, Kawabata's life after becoming famous is rarely full of passionate and dramatic anecdotes such as Dazai's love death, Mishima fitness, and Tanizaki's wife. He skillfully handled the complex interpersonal relationships of the literary world, serving as president of the Japanese PEN Association for seventeen years, and was even known as the "Prime Minister of the Literary World" at that time. He is an old man dragging a tired body, cautiously coping with his life.
He also remains a "celebrity at a funeral." Kawabata was familiar with funeral customs and was good at writing eulogies. The literary world regarded the funeral ceremony presided over by Kawabata as the final honor. At the funerals of Toshiichi Yokomitsu, Hiroshi Kikuchi, and Yukio Mishima, Kawabata was chaired by Kawabata.
One of Kawabata's great fetishes is his unusual love of travel. Yukio Mishima therefore wrote that Kawabata was "a traveler forever.". Perhaps in places far away from home and work, in the lonely journey, Kawabata can feel the vitality of life more and resist the impending of old age. If in the reverse journey of life, Dazaiji's loneliness is that of a teenager listening to rain songs upstairs, then Kawabata writes about the loneliness and desolation of the old man and listening to the rain monks. The lonely "human design" of the elderly is unpleasant, and the aging spiritual world is more difficult for people to understand. Kawabata said in "Snow Country" that "survival itself is a futility", which seems similar to "Born to be human, I am sorry", but the taste is very different.
"Private fiction" and "material lament" aesthetics
Kawabata, who is keen on travel, must agree that travel is the accumulation of fragments of beauty, while daily life is the tasteless operation of huge structures.
This can explain from one side why Kawabata's novels are often made up of short stories.
Kawabata's novel, borrowing from Lu Xun's commentary on the History of Ru Lin, can be described as "although the cloud is long, it is quite short". His more mature long works, "Mountain Sound" or "Beauty and Sorrow", in a relatively complete story, each chapter has a title. For example, the first chapter of "Mountain Sound" is the same title as the book, and the second chapter is titled "Cicada Wings", and the following articles are "Cloud Flame", "Chestnut", "Island Dream"... This situation is rare in long-form creations.
Another obvious reason is that these novels were not written in one fell swoop, but were published intermittently in the press. However, comparing the serial works of other writers (such as Yukio Mishima's Kinkaku-ji Temple), this sense of fragmentation will be found to be more like a deliberate creative pursuit. After all, Kawabata also had a case where the title of the chapter was proposed, but in the end it was not retained. The writing of "Snow Country" began in 1935 with the first "Twilight Mirror" in the series, and finally revised in 1948, which lasted for more than a decade. The final draft of "Snow Country" deleted the titles of each article. But when readers read "Snow Country", the feeling of short stories coming together into long stories does not diminish at all.
In fact, the way of writing from the part to the whole is precisely a major feature of Japanese literature. Literary historian Kato on Monday argues that this feature can be traced back to the special sentence order of Japanese modifier sentences before nouns and verbs last, developing from local to overall. This linguistic thinking ultimately affects every aspect of artistic creation. For example, in architecture, the mansions of the princes of the Edo period did not divide large spaces into small spaces, but rather natural connections between living rooms like expansions. Japanese literature also cruises more in local details and rarely considers the overall structure. Kawabata is well versed in Japanese Heian period literature, especially the Tale of Genji, and if you compare the structure of the Purple Style Department, it is clear why Kawabata's stylistic characteristics appear so much.
To this day, Yasunari Kawabata is still the best spokesperson for Japanese literature. In addition to his stylistic characteristics that are in line with tradition, his works also have a strong "private novel" flavor of Meiji and Posthumous literature. "Private fiction" not only facilitates the author to entrust the sensitive and melancholy state of mind in the heart, but also shares the experience with readers in similar emotions and establishes a stronger and deeper relationship. Kawabata's famous work "The Dancing Girl of Izu" is a "private novel". The events of the first Ito dynasty prompted Kawabata to write in details repeatedly, and there were more than forty works on this subject. Although Kawabata's novels conceal private traces more deeply, they are mostly based on real experiences, so they can often be touching.
The Nobel Prize's acceptance speech mentions that Kawabata's work "loves delicate beauty and appreciates the symbolic language that is imbued with sadness, and uses it to express the existence of natural life and human destiny." This slender, low-wandering, beautiful and sad style is not only an inevitable manifestation of the experience of writing a lonely and sad life through private novels, but also a natural flow of the traditional Japanese aesthetic of "material mourning".
Yasunari Kawabata was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature
As mentioned above, "thing lament" is "something that Ozu and Kawabata have in common", "thing lament" proposed by Honju Nobunaga in the Edo period has always been regarded as a core concept of Japanese aesthetics. Kawabata's journey to heaven and earth is to feel the beauty of all things, and to test it with the floating and sinking of the world, it is inevitable to feel sad. In his creation, he dissolves "material sorrow" into two key words: beauty and sorrow.
It is said that Kawabata must have two heroines to write a long story. This is true for komako and leaves in Snow Country, Fumiko and Yukiko in Thousand Cranes (as well as Kinko and Lady Ota), and Otoko and Keiko in Beauty and Sorrow. This obsession with the two heroines is Kawabata's deliberate writing strategy for finding the embodiment of beauty and sorrow. Of course, he never does the vulgar dichotomy of who is "beautiful" and who is "sad". Just as the image of these women is integrated with the "beauty" of the soul, it is also integrated with the "sorrow" of life and fate. "Beauty and Sorrow" is the common name of Kawabata's women.
The beauty of mourning is carried by the traditional Japanese haiku, japanese songs, tea ceremonies, flower ceremonies, calligraphy, kabuki, and even kimono art. As times change, these arts have become a fading flower, and they are gradually drifting away from japan's contemporary daily life. Osamu Dazai's sense of "depressiveness" tightens the beat of loneliness in the moment, Yukio Mishima's hot-blooded and wayward silhouette has a "burning" flavor, and Junichiro Tanizaki's "Tammy" itself has become the naming word for the theme of homosexual love in the emerging subculture branch. But yasunari Kawabata, who is "mournful" and elegant, seems more or less lonely and inappropriate.
At the end of "I Am in Beautiful Japan", Kawabata directs the beauty of mourning to "nothingness". He quoted the singer from the Westbound Master: "None of the words that are chanted are true words." In fact, yonghua does not think it is a flower; Yongyue does not think that it is a moon. But it's just a matter of chanting with impromptu pleasure. ”
Kawabata took advantage of the journey to Izu in 1918 to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, and the fifty years of pen cultivation were fleeting.
It seems that it is time to return to the fun.
Can a wordless death live indefinitely?
Unlike Yasunari Kawabata, who did not leave a word and died quietly. Yukio Mishima's death is like an elaborate writing.
Kawabata and Mishima have been close friends for many years. From the appearance, the two form a sharp contrast: Mishima admires the beauty of the ancient Greek flesh and is keen on fitness, while Kawabata is thin and dry, so that he can stare at people with a pair of eyes that seem to be prickly. Their literary claims differed more than their morphology. Traditional Japanese literature, in terms of creative class and expressive subjects, can probably see three types of public culture, samurai culture and common people culture. Kawabata was clearly an admirer of public culture, orthodox in literature created by aristocrats and monks. In his award-winning speech "I Am in Beautiful Japan", he listed "The Tale of Genji", "Pillow Grass" and "Japanese Songs", all of which come from this context. The heterogeneous works of military records such as "The Tale of The Tale of the Heike" and "Taiping Chronicle" that are not worth mentioning in Kawabata's view are classics in the samurai literary tradition that Mishima identifies with. In the 1960s, Mishima increasingly identified with Kawabata's disgusted militarist ideas, and showed a tendency to promote male sex and even misogynistic in his works. The two have long since parted ways.
On November 25, 1970, Mishima invaded the Eastern Superintendent of the Ground Self-Defense Forces in Tani, Tokyo, kidnapped the superintendent, and delivered a speech to the officers and men, calling on them to follow him to overturn the constitution that "prohibits the possession of an army", "become a real samurai", and defend the emperor and Japanese traditions. His speech only drew laughter and cursing. Mishima then tied a scarf belt of "Seven Lives to repay the country" and committed suicide by cutting his abdomen according to the samurai ritual.
The reason why it is said to be "elaborate writing" is because Mishima has already written several drafts of death in his works. He once personally played the role of an officer who dissected the abdomen of the failed coup d'état of "226" in the self-written and self-directed "Worried Country"; in "Running Horse", he also arranged the abdomen of the protagonist, the young kendo master Xun. Mishima also imitated st. Sebastian, the martyr of the arrow, in his personal portraits.
A portrait of Yukio Mishima
Guido Renée, San Sebastian
At that time, many writers rushed to the scene of Mishima's suicide, but only Kawabata was allowed to enter. It was later speculated that the impact of Mishima's caesarean section on Kawabata was one of the reasons for Kawabata's suicide.
Of course, he could not have identified with Yukio Mishima, who had been dissected in the samurai way. In fact, Kawabata has directly expressed his opposition to suicide:
In my essay "The Dying Eye", I wrote: "No matter how world-weary, suicide is not the way to enlightenment, and no matter how high the virtue, the holy state that the person who commits suicide wants to achieve is also distant." "I neither appreciate nor sympathize with Wasagawa, nor the suicidal behavior of Osamu Dazai and others after the war. ("I'm in Beautiful Japan")
However, why did Kawabata still choose to commit suicide?
In The Dying Eye, although Kawabata claims that "suicide is not the way to enlightenment," he also writes:
As an artist, aging is an irreparable tragedy; as a human being, it may be a kind of happiness. Of course, this is fiction. This ambiguous language is intolerable. And in the midst of this compromise, I felt a gentle south wind, telling me to forget everything. Because on the contrary, I think humans know more about death than life. That's why humanity survived.
In his later years, Kawabata was very weak, relying on sleeping pills for normal work and news, and was hospitalized several times for sleeping pills withdrawal or poisoning. In Yamato, Kawabata repeatedly writes about Shingo's fear of aging and death. It is said that before death, people will hear the sound of mountains, which is an ominous omen. The novel begins with the statement that "Shingo seems to feel that his life has gradually passed away", and that night, he hears the sound of the mountain:
It resembles the sound of the wind in the distance, but with a deep underpinnings like the sound of the earth. Shingo thought it was tinnitus and shook his head.
The sound stopped.
After the voice stopped, Shingo fell into fear. Could it be a sign that death is coming? He shuddered.
When Kawabata committed suicide, he was about to turn 73. His grandfather died at the age of 73. I don't know if Kawabata also heard the sound of the mountain and thought of the old situation that he had recorded in the "Diary of a Sixteen-Year-Old" that was in pain on the bed.
Kawabata once said: "Suicide without a suicide note is the best." A wordless death is an infinite life. "Compared with the dramatic deaths of Osamu Dazai and Mishima's caesarean section, the wordless death of aging is not enough to become a talking point.
From the current point of view, Kawabata is of course anachronistic and easily forgotten: his personality is not distinct enough, his experience is not legendary enough, it is difficult to be labeled; his book is too classical to be suitable for film and television adaptation. But in this era of declining traditional aesthetics, whether it can live indefinitely does not depend on whether Kawabata's cultural character is appropriate. The "present" is invariable, but the works that can be circulated have something solid and eternal.