This is by Yasunari Kawabata. Like many Japanese novels of the era, it was first published in serial form, beginning in 1949, and then came out as a book in 1952. My English version, published in 1959, was translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker.

Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind". The award ceremony speech by Anders Osterling of the Swedish Academy specifically mentions three of his works (Snow Country, The Old Capital, and this one).

Snow Country I really liked. Thousand Cranes, on the other hand, I struggled to warm to... Which is not to say it's not good. It manages to be multi-layered and intricate, yet understated and allusive. I can appreciate its visual qualities. It's nothing if not elegant. But I didn't like it.

Which puts me at odds with most of the reviews I've read. Examples: "This is an incredible book. I enjoyed Kawabata’s Snow Country but Thousand Cranes is something else"; "Kawabata's singular voice... was the most seductive I’d encountered in years."

So I'll record what I made of it, while humbly acknowledging it's very possible I didn't totally know what to make of it...


Illustration by Fumi Komatsu. "In Japanese folklore, the crane (or Tsuru in Japanese) is a strong majestic bird that mates for life and is said to live for a thousand years. It symbolizes honor, good fortune, loyalty, and longevity... The Japanese believed that anyone with the patience and commitment to fold 1,000 origami cranes would be given good fortune and granted a wish"

The overarching theme of Thousand Cranes is generational transition, which inevitably involves loss and confusion.

The younger generation is represented by Mitani Kikuji, our key protagonist, and two young women, Inamura Yukiko (the owner of the kerchief with the thousand-crane motif that provides the novel's title), and Ota Fumiko.

The older generation is represented by Kikuji's father (now dead, but still very present in the pages and in their lives), his mother (dead also, and only briefly in view), and two of Mr Mitani's former mistresses, Kurimoto Chikako and Mrs Ota (Fumiko's mother).

Chikako is a very strange character, and I think she symbolizes something that I have not entirely been able to grasp. She has a curious birthmark, purple-black and hairy, which covers half her left breast; Kikuji saw it when his father brought him to her residence at the age of eight or nine. It's a grotesque scene: When the pair arrive, she is cutting the hair on her birthmark with a small pair of scissors. Kikuji later hears his mother discussing the mark with his father (Chikako has told her about it, perhaps fearing the boy will mention it), and he notes his father's duplicitous silence. He worries that he might have a half-sibling who feeds at this -- to him -- monstrous breast, and he has weird fantasies about his father biting at the birthmark... Now I realize I might be missing something, but I found it all a bit offputting and yucky...

Kikuji's father's intimacy with Chikako doesn't last long. A couple of years after this incident, Chikako becomes "masculine in manner", and she is now "quite sexless". Slightly weirdly, she becomes not only his mother's companion but also her slightly over-zealous ally: "She prowled after his father, she frequently went to threaten Mrs Ota" (the next mistress, if you remember). And now Chikako is a manipulative, malevolent, and ubiquitous busybody, constantly interfering in Kikuji's life. She exudes a kind of venom that affects all around her. Kikuji has an almost superstitious fear of her: "I don't want that woman's destinies to touch mine at any point."

According to this study, "the novel ... is a microcosm of the new generation’s struggles to find its own place in the world and deal with the trauma of the war". Whether Chikako, marked from birth, represents the past or the present I can't really say. But a disruption in the legacy of the generations is apparent throughout.


Illustration by Fumi Komatsu

Aspects of the tea ceremony form the backdrop to many of the novel's scenes. But the text indicates a regrettable diminution of respect for its spiritual significance. Chikako says, for example, of the ceremony that opens the book: "It's been the rule that anyone who happens to be in the neighborhood can drop in. The other day I even had some Americans." It's all very casual, and the young women who are present know little about the equipment used.

In the rest of the book, the evidence of neglect piles up: Kikuji claims to know nothing about tea, and his friends are not interested either; the tea house on his property -- which his father had used regularly -- has fallen into disrepair, and is dark, damp, and full of mildew. And utensils are used for the wrong purpose, and passed on carelessly. Robinson enlarges on this latter point: "[The history of tea vessels] once showed their importance, but now shows merely their monetary value... Tea vessels are capable of bearing the weight of the history of their owners in a way humans are unable to. These same vessels, however, are falling prey to the forces of the times. Vessels are given to lovers out of passion, or sold to make ends meet. They are appraised, commodified, or shown off to tourists as relics of an age gone by." When Chikako suggests a tea ceremony for the fifth anniversary of Kikuji's father's death, Kikuji even suggests using imitation bowls: "This cottage always smells of some mouldy poison, and a really false ceremony might drive the poison away... I severed my relations with tea long ago." It's easy, even for outsiders, to divine that the ritual has gone awry.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Kawabata makes clear: "That spirit, that feeling for one’s comrades in the snow, the moonlight, under the blossoms, is also basic to the tea ceremony. A tea ceremony is a coming together in feeling, a meeting of good comrades in a good season. I may say in passing, that to see my novel Thousand Cranes as an evocation of the formal and spiritual beauty of the tea ceremony is a misreading. It is a negative work, an expression of doubt about and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen."


Paper cranes in today's culture

Yet, along with the disconnect, there's an inextricable and not entirely healthy intertwining of the generations, so that the previous cohort looms eerily over the current one. For example:

-- The meddlesome Chikako invites Kikuji to the tea ceremony she is presiding over in order to introduce him to Yukiko (the thousand-crane woman), whom she regards as a potential marriage-partner for him. Of course, Kikuji's father knew Yukiko's father... Unexpectedly and inopportunely, Mrs Ota and her daughter show up as well, importing another tranche of awkward history. Kikuji likes the look of Yukiko: "A very nice girl. And she would have seemed even nicer if I'd met her without the rest of you hovering around, you and Mrs Ota and Father's ghost."

-- Mrs Ota's late husband, who had kept Kikuji's father company "in the pursuit of tea", left a number of precious tea utensils on his death. Kikuji's father helps his widow dispose of them (which is how his relationship with her begins). But the tea paraphernalia come with lots of personal history. When Chikako invites Yukiko to make tea for Kikuji (at that initial tea ceremony), she instructs her to use a bowl that Kikuji's father had given her. Nothing wrong with that, except that it originally came from Mrs Ota, who acquired it from her husband... It's a bit tactless, Kikuji feels. Trying to defuse the tension that the tea bowl might kindle, Kikuji introduces what will be a recurring theme: "What difference does it make that my father owned it for a little while? It's four hundred years old, after all -- its history goes back to Momoyama and Rikyu [an early tea master] himself. Tea masters have looked after it and passed it down through the centuries. My father is of very little importance." But he can't help feeling there is "something almost weird about the bowl's career".

-- The theme of generational entwinement is emphasized when Kikuji has a brief affair with Mrs Ota (his father's former mistress, remember, and at least 20 years old than he is...). In their initial encounter, he fears he might somehow find within himself the father that Mrs Ota had loved: "He was tempted to imagine that he had known this woman's body long ago." Mrs Ota later visits Kikuji in the tea house. "He had been led easily into the other world. He could only think of it as another world, in which there was no distinction between his father and himself." Rather cruelly, he accuses her: "You think of my father, don't you, and my father and I become one person."

-- Ota Fumiko at one point asks Kikuji to forgive her mother, but to have nothing further to do with her. Confused and guilty, Mrs Ota commits suicide. Both Kikuji and Fumiko think this was their fault, but they agree to tell people it was a natural death.

-- Then the situation is reversed, and Kikuji starts to see her mother in Fumiko: "If Mrs Ota had made her mistake when she saw Kikuji's father in Kikuji, then there was something frightening, a bond like a curse, in the fact that, to Kikuji, Fumiko resembled her mother; but Kikuji, unprotesting, gave himself to the drift... He was haunted by the thought that he was falling in love with Mrs Ota, now that she was dead. And he felt that the love was made known through the daughter, Fumiko... One's heart could indeed move from mother to daughter; but if, still drunk in the embrace of the mother, he had not sensed that he was being passed on to the daughter, had he not in fact been the captive of witchcraft?"

All a bit mind-bending, no?



Let's get back to the tea... Ah, but that's weird and distorted too, because nothing is neutral or meaningless in this story...

-- The day after the seventh-day memorial service for Mrs Ota, Kikuji visits Fumiko. She brings out black and red Raku tea bowls: "A displeasing picture flashed into Kikuji's mind. Fumiko's father had died and Kikuji's father had lived on; and might not this pair of Raku bowls have served as teacups when Kikuji's father came to see Fumiko's mother? Had they not been used as 'man-wife' teacups? ... He and Fumiko, haunted by the death of her mother, were unable to hold back this grotesque sentimentality. The pair of Raku bowls deepened the sorrow they had in common. Fumiko too knew everything: Kikuji's father and her mother, her mother and Kikuji, her mother's death. And they had shared the crime of hiding the suicide."

-- Fumiko gives Kikuji a Shino tea bowl (these names refer to the origin of the ware). She says it is stained with her mother's lipstick: "The color of faded lipstick, the color of old, dry blood -- Kikuji began to feel queasy. A nauseating sense of uncleanness and an overpowering fascination came simultaneously... The woman in Fumiko's mother came to him again, warm and naked. Why had Fumiko brought this bowl, stained with her mother's lipstick?"

-- Later, Fumiko asks him to destroy the bowl with the lipstick stain, because it is inferior. In the portable tea chest Kikuji's father used to take on journeys, they find a Karatsu bowl. They put it with the Shino bowl (the lipstick bowl): "The two bowls before them were like the souls of his father and her mother... Seeing his father and Fumiko's mother in the bowls, Kikuji felt that they had raised two beautiful ghosts and placed them side by side... Kikuji had said to her, on the day after the seventh-day services for her mother, that there was something terrible in his being with her, facing her. Had the guilt and the fear been wiped away by the touch of the bowls?"

-- But no, Fumiko still has this sense of being held by the dead. She tries to make tea for them, using the bowl she wants to break. She can't. It is as though her mother is stopping her. "Kikuji started up and took her by the shoulders, as if to pull her from the meshes of a curse. There was no resistance..." It's all very opaque, but we assume they make love. This seems to free him: "The idea had quite left him that the mother's body was in a subtle way transferred to the daughter, to lure him into strange fantasies... It was as if an addict had been freed of his addiction by taking the ultimate dose of a drug."

-- But Fumiko breaks the bowl: "What had she so dreaded having him compare the Shino with? And why had the possibility so worried her? Kikuji could think of no reason." And the next day he can't locate her. He's afraid she's dead.

The novel ends like this: "'She has no reason to die,' he muttered. There was no reason for Fumiko to die, Fumiko who had brought him life. But had the simple directness of the evening before been the directness of death? Was she, like her mother, guilt-ridden, afraid of the directness? 'And only Kurimoto is left.' As if spitting out all the accumulated venom on the woman he took for his enemy, Kikuji hurried into the shade of the park."


Cranes in Hiroshima, 2015

Although there is little direct reference to the war in the text, we are told that Fumiko initially dislikes Kikuji's father (who is in some ways replacing her dead father), but softens, and helps keep him fed when the raids are happing. Quite how she engineers this is not clear, but Kikuji wonders whether the gifts his father brought home from time to time, from which he and his mother also benefited, were the result of the clever purchases of "the Ota girl". Mrs Ota sugests to Kikuji that Fumiko's attitude changed because they didn't know, from one day to the next, whether they would survive: "In the confusion of defeat, the girl must have known how desperately her mother clung to Kikuji's father. In the violent reality of those days, she must have left behind the past that was her own father, and seen only the present reality of her mother."

Leaving behind the past... Grasping the present reality... No-one seems to quite manage to do that in this book.

There's also some mystery about a pocket watch that Chikako and Fumiko know about, but Kikuji doesn't. And there's a mention of that night during the war when Fumiko was missing... I wondered -- although no commentary has confirmed it -- whether there was something between Fumiko and Kikuji's father too... In this strange inter-generational spider's web, that would certainly make sense...


The thousand-cranes motif became synonymous with the suffering of Hiroshima. Sadako Sasaki, who folded well over 1,000 cranes, died of leukaemia in 1955


In her honour, classmates rallied to raise money to build the Children's Peace Monument

_*_*_

So, I finished the book feeling a little confused and a little repelled.

It is impossible to deny the beauty of the language, though, even in translation. Some examples:

-- "The shadow of young leaves fell on the paper-paneled door... The light was really too bright for a tea cottage, but it made the girl's youth glow... And one saw a thousand cranes, small and white, start up in flight around her."

-- "The red sun seemed about to flow down over the branches. The grove stood dark against it... The white cranes from the Inamura girl's kerchief flew across the evening sun, which was still in his eyes."

-- Kikuji's maid hangs a gourd in the alcove; in it she places a morning glory: "It was a plain indigo morning glory, probably wild, and most ordinary. The vine was thin, and the leaves and blossom were small. But the green and the deep blue were cool, falling over a red-lacquered gourd dark with age." The gourd is probably 300 years old: "In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning."

Which is a very appropriate way to end...