Books: Sound of No Bell Ringing

BEAUTY AND SADNESS by YASUNARI KAWABATA

Translated by HOWARD HIBBETT

206pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Yasunari Kawabata’s last novel is a consummately skillful arrangement of space and stillness, a brush drawing of love and vengeance not ultimately convincing, but perhaps ultimately not meant to convince. Yet the novel’s measure is that its most fascinating feature may be the face of the writer bleakly regarding the reader from the dust jacket. Scraps of knowledge help: Kawabata, the author of Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968; he wrote no novel after this one; he killed himself at age 72 in 1972. The jacket photograph obviously was made toward the end of his life: the face is unamused, undeluded, intelligent.

The eyes are open wide, the pupils dilated and vulnerable.

Kawabata’s face is that of a man who has indeed reached an ending, and speculation, though idle, is unavoidable. In what seems to be the only unguarded paragraph in the book, Kawabata’s hero, a middle-aged writer, wryly asks his wife the proper retirement age for a novelist. The novel itself is an answer: it is time to stop writing when there is nothing left but professionalism.

Without a misstep or a false line, the author ensnares his writer protagonist Oki Toshio in an old love. Without quite admitting to himself why he is making the trip, the hero journeys alone from Tokyo to Kyoto to hear the temple bells ring in the new year. In this city of shrines lives Otoko, with whom he had had a passionate affair 20 years earlier. She was a schoolgirl and he a young married man, and a child was stillborn from their love. For a time Otoko’s grief unbalanced her. Toshio did not see her again, but his first novel, which idealized their love, became a bestseller and in fact still supports the author, his wife, and their grown son.

Otoko has become a successful artist, Toshio knows, and when the two meet again, as of course they must, she brings with her a beautiful art student named Keiko. It is clear that Otoko still has deep feelings for Toshio. It is also clear that she and Keiko share a lesbian love. And before long it is obvious that Keiko has come to like very much the dismay she causes when she is capriciously cruel. She sets out, giggling, to seduce Toshio and to ruin his son. What is unsatisfactory about this is not that it rings false, but that it does not ring at all.

The final appalling scene is meant to strike a gong, but there is no resonance, no reverberation. The characters and their pain disappear from the mind with the turn of the last page.

J.S.