Sooooo, another book about old men having sex with young girls. Another solipsistic paedophile. How awkward. Beauty and Sadness opens with Oki Toshio, a writer now in his fifties, taking a trip to listen to the Kyoto bells. This trip is a wishful stab at the past; the bells are a metaphor for Ueno Otoko, a painter fifteen years younger than Oki. Oki muses on his memories of the relationship between then fifteen-year-old Otoko and thirty-year-old Oki, which ended in a miscarriage and an attempted suicide on the young girl’s part.
Beauty and Sadness — that name is pretty incredible; now you don’t need to read any other books, ever — is a slimmer tome than Lolita, and though it has the same learned elder opportunist, the same precocious, pleading, sexualised child, Kawabata’s Oki is less self-reflexive than Humbert squared. Or rather, Kawabata’s characters are less able to be expressive; they are more restrained. Although their emotions insist on alarming closeness to the surface, each finds a way to sublimate the sharp and the tender: Oki diverts all his energies into successful novels (the Japanese public was enthralled and offended by the publication of his A Girl of Sixteen…WTF, guys!); Oki’s wife, Fumiko, submerges herself in the task of typing up Oki’s manuscripts (What. The. F.); Otoko, now a famous artist, has taken her teenaged protegée, Keiko, as a lover (WTF!!!!!!!!.); and Keiko has taken it upon herself to revenge her mentor’s long-suffered trauma.
There is something in this disconnect between the characters’ fine artistic sensibilities — sensibilities which can pick out the outlines of plovers on kimono fabric, describe a painting’s diversion from traditional styles, appreciate delicate details in natural settings — and their dereliction of emotional awareness. Oki, with his inability to tame his taste for young girls, is an almost comical, singularly self-regarding vehicle for Kawabata’s exploration of memory. In one instance, he considers the food Otoko has gifted him, discerning in ‘some small, perfectly formed rice balls’ the depths of ‘a woman’s emotions’.
Just as the characters sublimate their disturbances into other channels, so do they elect to focus to a heightened extent on nature’s accoutrements; extended meditations on the beauty of stone outcrops and sparkling waters calm the minds of reader and characters alike, and the chapters all take their names from the external settings of the various incidents: ‘The Lake’, ‘The Lotus in the Flames’.
Though Beauty and Sadness climbs to a dramatic finish whose events reverberate for all involved, it is hard for the attention not to catch time and again on the difference between Kawabata’s depiction of Oki and the female characters. Oki’s pathetic inability to draw himself away from the lures of young flesh is illustrated in detail, but it is not decried in situ as the actions of the female characters are. Keiko’s obsession with revenge is ‘violent’, ‘conceited’; meanwhile, Otoko, at the time of her miscarriage, ‘being young, suffered no ill effects’. I thought that was a bit rough. Oki’s character, being impervious to the criticism of himself and others, is a poor candidate for moral redemption or learning, even when those lessons are learned at the expense of those closest to him. As such, the impressions of beauty and sadness derived from this book are only fractured and fleeting, the confusion of echoes in a hall of mirrors.
