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Books: Kinship of Guilt

3 minute read
Lance Morrow

THE LAKE by YASUNARI KAWABATA Translated by REIKO TSUKIMURA 160 pages. Kodansha International $6.95.

Yasunari Kawabata is probably best known in the West for his novels Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959). Which is to say that this most Japanese of Japanese writers remains somewhat obscure to Western readers despite his 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. His fiction seems to be most valued in Japanese for those qualities that are most difficult to render in trans lation: precision and delicacy of image, the shimmer of haiku, an allusive sad ness and minute sense of the impermanence of things.

The Lake, written in 1955, is some what like Kawabata’s other works in its disregard of conventional plot, proceeding back and forth across time only by a logic of association. It also possesses an uncharacteristic and rather clammy eroticism. In this claustrophobic reverie, Gimpei Momoi, a 34-year-old schoolteacher, a dim cousin of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, disconsolately follows women, or schoolgirls, through the streets. Filled with a “masochistic self-disgust” that has its origins in his own deformed feet, Gim pei (which might almost be some accidental translingual pun — “Momoi the Gimp”) is another of literature’s repellent voyeurs — a wincing, hypersensitive defective on the sad trail of in effable beauty.

One woman that he pursues hurls her purse at him and flees. Opening the purse, Gimpei finds a minor fortune in yen that the woman has just drawn from the bank; he steals it and flees himself. The woman never reports the loss to the police, for it is money she collected in shame as the mistress of an aged industrialist. Kawabata possessed a delicate sense of the tie between victim and criminal, the kinship of guilt. And of the kinship of sex and death, which the artist, in whatever deformed guises, labors to transcend through art itself.

The Lake is often lovely in its diaphanous scenes — a nighttime ritual of catching fireflies, for example. In this translation, at least, it is also sometimes disagreeable and unsettling. One passage in which Gimpei gets a massage in a Karuizawa bathhouse reads eerily like Arthur Bremer’s diary, in which he described a visit to a Manhattan massage parlor some time before he started stalking George Wallace. There might be a good doctoral thesis in the psychological relationship between the literary and the political creep in the late 20th century. Kawabata could not offer any further advice for it, however, since he quietly committed suicide in 1972 at the age of 72. —Lance Morrow

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