PARTISAN REVIEW
577
dramatizes the discovery, made by everyone in this book, that he
is
separate, not integral; alone, not united. As in his other three books
published in the United States, Kawabata celebrates - though that is
too emphatic a verb for his fictions; let me say he gratefully concedes–
the opacity of other people, an opacity invincible though yearned against,
convulsively opposed:
It was not perhaps remarkable that his secretary should be acquaint–
ed with the woman [his son's mistress] when his own family was
not; but Shingo found that fact hard to accept.
It
was particularly
hard to accept when he had Eiko here before
him.
One knew she
was a person of no consequence, and yet on such occasions she
seemed to hang heavily before him, like the curtain of life itself. He
could not guess what was passing through her mind.
We exist, Kawabata's novel makes clear, from the instant we are sun–
dered from our mother, not from the instant we are engendered within
her. We are not members of one another, but dismembered: we may
speak, there will be interferences, contaminations; oblique, sedate con–
versations which undercut the expected end. Suddenly we are face
to
face, or rather, naked before each other, when we had anticipated no
more than a handshake, a bow. But we must suffer the consequence of
utterance when we do so, the consequence of merely articulating Swin–
burne's terrible truth which is the schematic core of this poetic fiction,
this pathetic fallacy :
marriage, death and division make barren our lives.
Entirely seen by Shingo's presbyopic eyes, heard or rather overheard
by his otosclerotic ears, the people and passions of the novel are defined
by a faulty receiving apparatus, for Shingo has his own wars to wage
against decrepitude. Like Umberto D in DeSica's brave film, he is not
helped on by humor but by will and by a kind of artistic curiosity about
his own defections from grace. As his friends and contemporaries drop
off, victims of cancer, a coronary in the arms of a cooperative geisha,
suicide and madness, and plagued by a family life in which privacy is
to
be
achieved only by internal exile, emotional mutism, one solace is left,
and it is the surprising success of this grim life lived against the back–
ground of grim death. The contemplation of nature, the response to the
life of animals and plants and the earth itself, affords the sole relief
from the contemplation of extinction, for even by these mediocre, un–
worldly men and women, nature is always regarded aesthetioally - as
an otherness which does not require dialogue, only delight. The very
food one eats is not detached from its pervasive function as a part of
the natural landscape. It is only selfhood which is so detached, dry, dumb
- centripetal identities unable to penetrate each other except by sudden
spasms of sexual terrorism, and deriving what comfort is to be had from
