First Snow on Fuji by Yasunari Kawabata

One of the greatest rewards thus far in my effort to read the books listed in Clifton Fadiman's The New Lifetime Reading Plan was the discovery of the works of Yasunari Kawabata. After reading and loving Beauty and Sadness, Fadiman's choice, I quickly devoured the Nobel laureate's other major novels: Snow Country, The Master of Go, Thousand Cranes, and my favorite, The Sound of the Mountain. Kawabata's minimalist fiction looks at big themes of love or death through the small details, a tea ceremony, a game of Go. His novels inhabit the silences, the spaces between, and attempt little resolution to the tensions explored there.

I have found less pleasure in Kawabata's short stories. Some are cut from the same cloth of greatness as his best novels, and are worthwhile no matter the length (like the title story in The Dancing Girl of Izu). But in others, Kawabata's atmospheric glimpses of life prove too elusive to be captured in a mere dozen pages. So it is in First Snow on Fuji, where the best selections are two of the longest: the title story and "Silence."

The title story features a man and woman who were a couple before the war ("the war" is always World War II in Kawabata's work). When she became pregnant, her parents took her to the country where she bore the child, but was forced to give it up. Nearly a decade later, these two lives have moved on, with new spouses, new children, but a happenstance reunion reopens old wounds and sparks ambiguous emotions:

Jiro wanted to see Utako's face as it used to be. It was painful for him to look at her haggard features. And so from searching out the Utako he had known in the Utako before him, from trying not to see the Utako before him, his own eyes came to have a fatigued look to them. He didn't want her to feel that he was staring at her, but he didn't know where else to look.

After this chance meeting at a train station, they agree to travel together to a bathhouse. But while Jiro's attention remains on the physical changes their bodies have undergone, the toll that time has taken, Utako remains psychologically stuck in the past, haunted by the child they had together and lost:

Utako had not heard until after the end of the war that the child had died in the care of the person who took it.

"But--do you think the child really died?" Utako said.

Jiro looked away.

"Sometimes I think that it might still be alive, you know--possibly."

"I'm certain that it's dead."

"If it's alive, do you think if I met it somewhere--do you think I would know?"

As they arrive at the bathhouse and spend an evening there, Kawabata explores the passage of time and the human efforts to reach back through memory to recapture what is lost. He exposes the difficulty in reconciling the image of a person as we knew them intimately in the past with the altogether foreign person they have become after years of separation. And he hints at how much of our thoughts and emotions are lost on those near us for lack of effective communication.

Communication, the power of words and language, is the theme of the collection's best story, "Silence." In a plot with odd foreshadowing of Kawabata's later years (explored by the translator in his introduction), the narrator visits an elderly writer who has been crippled by a stroke. He is able to hear, but having lost the use of his voice and right hand, is unable to speak or to write effectively. He may, however, have very limited use of his left hand to write single letters, leaving the question of why he opts not to employ it:

It is strange, isn't it, that a man who has made his living for forty years using letters and characters to write words should, now that he has almost entirely lost those letters and characters, and consequently come to understand the powers they possess in the most fundamental sense, and with the greatest certainty--now that he as become able to use them with such knowledge--it is strange, is it not, that he should deny himself their use. The single letter "w" or "t" might be worth more than all the flood, the truly tremendous flood of words and letters he has written in his life. That single letter might be a more eloquent statement, a more important work. It might well have more force.

The narrator's visit to the writer's bedside, where the writer's daughter attends to him, raises further questions about language, communication, and understanding. One question is who a story belongs to, the speaker or the audience? The narrator and the daughter discuss one of the old writer's novels, in which a troubled youth asks his mother to read to him from a blank piece of paper that he thinks he has written upon:

No doubt the crazy boy thinks he's having his mother read some sort of record of his memories, something that he wrote himself--that's what he thinks he's listening to. His eyes sparkle with pride. His mother has no idea whether or not he understands what she's saying, but every time she comes to see him she repeats the same story, and she gets better and better at telling it--it begins to seem like she's actually reading a story of her son's. She remembers things she had forgotten. And the son's memories grow more beautiful. The son is drawing the mother's story out, helping her, changing the story--there's no way of telling whose novel it is, whether it's the mother's or the son's.

The same can be said of Kawabata's best works, when it often seems as if Kawabata is exploring our silences and our atmospherics. In several of the longer stories in this collection, Kawabata flirts with this power. In the remainder, however, Kawabata struggles to convey more than a whisper of what he seems to intend. There is little time to settle into the spirit of the scene and grasp the characters or the conflicts that are motivating them. If Kawabata reigns in the spaces between, it is because he has answered an essential question: the spaces between what? A prerequisite unsatisfied in too many of these stories.