Beauty and Sadness

Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty and Sadness is another meditation from Kawabata on unrequited love, inappropriate love, and love as a weapon; in other words, those who have read one or more other Kawabata works will not find anything new between these covers. What keeps the dedicated fan coming back is an appreciation for Kawabata's style of writing, best described as spare, but without being minimal. Kawabata has a knack for understated emotion that is all too rare in the (loosely-termed) romance novel.

The book opens with a writer, Oki Toshio (described on the back cover of my version as a penitent, interestingly), going to Kyoto to hear the new year's bells and trying to decide whether to look up his old love Otoko while he's there. After some hesitant gestures on both sides, Oki and Otoko see one another, and Oki is introduced to Otoko's live-in pupil, Keiko. Keiko is a brash, on-the-bounds-of-boorish girl who hates Oki for the pain he caused Otoko earlier in their lives (before, it is assumed, Keiko was even born), and Keiko sets out to find a way to revenge her teacher.

The plot of the novel is somewhat predictable, almost to the point of having become a chestnut; that said, Kawabata allows himself some leeway with the classic noir-ish twists and turns, taking everything at a leisurely pace, exploring various subplots, and most of all making Keiko a complex creation, rather than the bitch-on-a-mission one is used to seeing in such roles. The reader can never be sure whether Keiko is to be the bad guy or sympathetic in her immaturity; one gets the feeling the author didn't, either, which lends that much more strength to the novel's construction.

A fine piece of work, considered by many to be Kawabata's masterpiece. I liked Thousand Cranes slightly better, but both are well worth the reader's time.