Books: Fine & Bitter Tea

LADY OF BEAUTY (192 pp.) — Kikou Yamata—John Day ($3).

The Japanese say that in the finest tea one can taste the water with which it was made. Lady of Beauty is just such a subtle cup of literary tea. In it, Kikou Yamata, daughter of a Japanese diplomat and a French mother, tells the story of Nobuko Hayashi, aloof, highborn and exquisite, and how the war racked and finally killed her without using a bullet or a bomb. At once surface and symbol, Lady of Beauty is a quiet requiem for a culture as well as a person, by a mourner who remains charmingly alive.

Nobuko, the lady of beauty, is fortyish, and lives in a fine villa by the sea near Tokyo. She is married to a wealthy financier, and possessively loves her young and only son. True, she must share her husband’s affection with a common geisha in Tokyo, but she neither rants nor strays from the marital quilt. Proud of the firm body her husband neglects, she swims in the crashing offshore combers, or takes up the foils with her son’s fencing master. Nominally a Roman Catholic convert, Nobuko finds her true religion in the classic No plays, to her a kind of mystic opium.

War and the threat of it foreclose the lady’s world. Needing the gardener’s quarters, she asks him to sleep off premises, and he commits suicide. The police curb offshore swimming, the No plays are closed down. To cap these indignities, when Nobuko’s son falls ill, her husband’s geisha flaunts her status by sending a get-well present for the boy. Nobuko, who almost never sees her husband any more, falls ill (tuberculosis of the bone). In nightly agonies of pain, she struggles with Death, “fighting like a child with only one weapon, talking to him in a lonely night watch.” But the Great Commoner finally quells her aristocratic spirit.

Melancholy but graceful, Lady of Beauty is steeped in the sights and sounds and rituals of Japanese life. As if to signify her own conviction that the old Japan is dead. Author Yamata now shuttles be tween Paris and the shores of Lake Leman with her Swiss painter husband. Yet she recalls the self-exiled Joyce, who could write only of Dublin: while Author Yamata may have left Japan, Japan will never wholly leave her—or anyone who opens her finespun novel.