Reporter | Intern journalist Lin Liuyi
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"Suicide without a suicide note is the best." A wordless death is an infinite life. In the spring of 1972, 10 years after writing this line of resolute writing, Yasunari Kawabata, a "Japanese outcast" who had been lonely all his life, did not leave a suicide note on the gas pipeline and died without a word. As early as 1966, the Japanese literary critic Ito Sento sent a letter to the Swedish Academy of Letters, sincerely recommending Kawabata's works and evaluating his outlook on life and creation with "life is like an illusion". The futility and illusion of life are the sad undertones that Kawabata has created throughout his life, but on top of the bleak tone, he has poured the most vigorous observation into the beauty of the delicate and fragile life. In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became Japan's first writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature with three masterpieces representing the pinnacle of national aesthetics— Snow Country, Ancient Capital, and Thousand Cranes.
The Swedish Academy of Letters praised Yasunari Kawabata for "expressing the essence of the Japanese psyche with extraordinary acumen and superb novel skills." Like the previous writer Junichiro Tanizaki, Kawabata's creations were clearly baptized by modern European realist literature, but at the same time, they were also based on Japanese classical aesthetics, and maintained and inherited the "exquisite and transparent pure Japanese art". In the spiritual bridge grafting between the East and the West, Yasunari Kawabata made an irreplaceable and immortal contribution. On April 16 of this year, the 50th anniversary of the death of this Japanese writer, Dai Huan, a scholar and translator of modern and contemporary Japanese literature, and Zhou Wanjing, a young scholar, writer and art critic, talked about the creative world of Yasunari Kawabata on this day, and observed Kawabata's contemplation of delicate life and ambitions for national culture between the lines.
Beauty and Truth in Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country": Writing about snow in reality, but also writing about the sludge under the snow
"If you only write about the cleanliness of the snow, you lose the truth, if you only write about the sludge under the snow, you lose the beauty." Dai Huan, as the Chinese translator of Kawabata, noticed that in "Snow Country", Yasunari Kawabata "really writes" about the cleanliness of the snow and also "writes" about the sludge under the snow, combining truth and beauty, and strives to explore the balance between them. In Snow Country, a dance researcher named Shimamura from Tokyo travels to the Snow Country Onsen Inn three times and meets the local geisha komako and the maiden Leaf, and the story revolves around the delicate and delicate emotions between a man and a woman. Dai Huan pointed out that the feelings and memories of the hero Shimamura are like the snow of the snow country, and the real snow country is like the sludge under the snow - Shimamura's perspective is just like a filter covering the snow country, and it is through this filter that the novel shows the reader the two women of komako and leaf, showing the terroir and conditions of the snow country.
Zhou Wanjing quoted Yukio Mishima's evaluation of Kawabata, arguing that the most successful part of Kawabata's creation was the depiction of "terroir" and "instinct". If the outline of customs and folklore is the source of the "truth" of "Snow Country", then the "futility of life" hidden under the terroir is the source of the "beauty" of the novel.
Zhou Wanjing used the terroir plot of "women making crepe" in "Snow Country" as an example to explain in detail the "futile beauty" hidden in the Japanese terroir: in the snow country, women began to reel silk in October of the old calendar, and then dried it in mid-February of the following year, pouring all their love into the textile during this frozen and snowy day. Women who are exquisitely woven crepe will be chosen and married, but after they are married, their short youth and life will not even be as long as the life of crepe. Kawabata also uses the cocoon " as a symbol in his depiction of komako , meaning that a woman toils in a cocoon room all her life, but her whole life is not worth a piece of cloth. Zhou Wanjing pointed out that an important concept that runs through Kawabata's works is "women's flowering period", women's beauty is sacrificed and worn in labor, leaving behind items that are far longer than their own lives, and the beauty of women's flowering is a "futile beauty". Therefore, she believes that Kawabata's vigorous portrayal of the terroir of "textile crepe" also implies Kawabata's respect, lamentation and sympathy for "the futility and sacrifice of women's lives".
Yasunari Kawabata: Bunko Ben (all nine volumes) New Classic Culture 2022 Edition Of Women's Flowering: The Old Aesthetics Of The Female Body
Although the concept of "women have a flowering period" reflects the masculine perspective in Kawabata's works to a certain extent, unlike other male authors, it is a sincere male perspective that is "not without introspection". Dai Huan pointed out that the beauty of Kawabata's works is inseparable from the depiction of women's beauty, and women are often the place where men's good feelings are evoked and are the objects of aesthetics. After all, Kawabata is a sincere male author, who has been constantly reflecting on the aesthetic distance between men and women from beginning to end, and constantly exposing and mocking the "male to female observation". This introspection is vividly reflected at the end of "Snow Country": Japanese critic Kato on Monday believes that from beginning to end, Komako lives from Shimamura's perspective, but it is at the end that when Komako screams and runs to the dead leaves, she has the initiative, as if with the advancement of Kawabata's brushstrokes, Komako finally successfully breaks through from Shimamura's gaze and becomes real and vivid.
At the same time, the beauty of the woman's body in Kawabata's pen is connected with Japan's past cultural traditions and aesthetics. In Zhou Wanjing's view, Kawabata's writing of women is a tribute to the aesthetic conception of The Tale of Genji and the Heian period, and is a search for the roots of the beauty of Japan's own culture. Between Hideichiro Tanizaki and Kawabata, a revival of re-reading the Tale of Genji, believed that the Purple Style's depiction of the Heian nobility had the beauty of japan in the past. In "The Tale of Genji", all the women around hikari have a corresponding symbol of flowers, which is an important starting point for the formation of the aesthetic concept of "women have a flowering period".
The philosopher Kugi Shuzo, a contemporary of Kawabata and Tanizaki, analyzed the changes in the "taste" of Japanese women in the process of growing up in the study of Japanese "color" and female beauty. Nine ghosts believe that the girlhood of a woman presents a sweet "sweet taste", after maturity is the elegant "spirit", and when it begins to age, it becomes "astringent", which is the flowering period of women. The "color gas" culture is born out of the aesthetics of the female body, and is an aesthetic theory and body discourse unique to Japanese culture.
《Japanese Color Gas》
[Day] Nine Ghosts Zhou Zao by Wang Xiangyuan translated
One page folio Beijing United Publishing Company 2019
According to Zhou Wanjing, local customs and women's physical beauty "preserve and suspend the japan of the past", and Kawabata wrote them to find the foundation of Japanese national aesthetics in the process of retrospection, and this "backwards force" is also reflected in his predecessor writer Nagai Hefeng and contemporary writer Junichiro Tanizaki.
Destroying "Beauty": "Fire" in "Snow Country" and "Kinkaku-ji Temple"
At the end of "Snow Country", a fire in the theater causes Ye Zi to die, and Ye Zi's body falls from a broken wooden house in the vast snow, light, poignant and determined. In Kinkaku-ji Temple, it is also a fire that burns kinkaku-ji Temple, which symbolizes beauty and eternity. Some critics have pointed out that the leaf is a symbol of supreme beauty, just like Kinkaku-ji Temple, but the most beautiful thing must be destroyed. As readers, how should we understand Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima's determination to destroy the most beautiful things?
Dai Huan cuts from the relationship between "life and death" and "beauty" and believes that in Kawabata's works, beauty and death are always interdependent and set off each other: life and death are different aspects of beauty, and death is an eternal shadow for the living, and this shadow appears to be more three-dimensional and moving. Just as Kawabata symbolizes komako with images such as cocoons and moths, "Kawabata has the eyes to discover beauty, and can discover the vitality and meaning of life in the shadow of death." ”
Zhou Wanjing observed that the necessity of "fire" is also related to the desire for "refining" and "purification" in Japanese culture, which is a force that strives to deepen and extract inwards, just like Kawabata's generation's root-cutting pursuit of Japan's national character. In addition, the "burning house" section in "Kinkaku-ji Temple" and "Snow Country" also makes people feel the fragility of "wooden structure", symbolizing the fragility and inheritance of wooden houses of cultural traditions, and the fragility has the essence of beauty as considered by Japanese writers.
Kinkaku-ji Temple (translated by Chen Dewen, Ichiga folio 2021 edition) with Yukio Mishima
In Japanese culture, the proper meaning of beauty is often broken, which also proves the "emphasis on simplicity and incompleteness in Japanese aesthetics". In Zhou Wanjing's view, "the Japanese national tradition of cherry blossom viewing is also an example of the admiration of mutilated and fragile beauty", to appreciate the decline of beauty in the season of growth of all things, and the cherry blossoms are beautiful at the moment when the peak is bound to decline and begin to change. "Beauty is in the moment, why did Mishima burn Kinkaku-ji Temple, because he wanted to push it to that moment, and in the instant eternally pay tribute to beauty."
"This shore nature" and "material mourning": the reflection of nothingness and existence
The aesthetic connection between beauty and death, beauty and mutilation is undoubtedly rooted in the Inseparable Japanese aesthetic tradition of "material sorrow", behind the fragile and slender beauty is sadness, and it is the futility and powerlessness of man's fate. However, unlike Chinese's understanding of "lament", the Japanese interpretation of "lament" does not always carry sorrow and sadness, and Zhou Wanjing discerned that "'lament' in the story of Japanese Stories also has the meaning of love and sympathy, love and admiration." From the earliest Monogatari story to modern Japanese literature, the Japanese understanding of "mourning" has always had a happy connotation, which is a kind of "bitterness, first bitterness and then sweetness, similar to the taste of Japanese matcha."
Dai Huan quoted the Japanese critic Ito Zhen as saying that for Kawabata himself and even the Japanese nation, "life is short and fleeting, and the ultimate purpose of life is illusory," which is the deep cultural foundation of the aesthetics of material mourning. In Ito's view, the Japanese worldview is more concerned with this shore, concerned with the concrete, and special phenomena of the present world, and does not recognize the existence of transcendence, the other shore, and the absolute. Dai Huan added that Japanese characters have been influenced by Chinese culture since their inception, and that Japan's native worldview can only be found in the stories and folklore of ancient times. The worldview of Japan in the ancient century was flat, the gods and generations in the ancient century were continuous, and the boundary between life and death was also very blurred. "Reflecting on the outlook on life, the Japanese people pay more attention to the specific situations and processes of life, rather than thinking about the ultimate purpose and meaning."
Image source: Visual China
Dai Huan believes that this outlook on life will bring about the hedonistic color of timely pleasure on the one hand, and the attitude of "pouring into the moment", on the other hand, it is embodied in the sentimentality of nothingness that can never be shaken off. In Kawabata's works, "action has never been the most important, what is important is always feeling," in other words, it is precisely because of the nihilism of the background that Kawabata is better at pouring more attention into the things in front of him, presenting a vibrant picture of the present world. Zhou Wanjing further observed that in the ukiyo-e culture of the Edo period, "focusing on the current hedonism and the powerlessness of life like duckweed, this relationship between nothingness and existence has been formed." As Kawabata recounts in Fishing Fire, happiness is invisible, tomorrow is unpredictable, and if you take these as hopes, it is true, and if you think of it as a promise, it is a lie.