◆ Jiang Feng, chief writer of "Japanese Overseas Chinese Daily".
About one hour by Shinkansen from Tokyo to the Sea of Japan is a small town called Yuzawa. Some Chinese also write it as "Yuzawa". Don't think it's "unknown", but it's a paradise for skiers at home and abroad, and has hosted the Ski World Cup. As you can tell from the name of the place, it is rich in moisture. Due to the abundance of snow in winter, Yuzawa, along with the entire Niigata Prefecture where it is located, is known as the "Snow Country". Today, this small town with a population of just over 8,000 is an important center of Japanese literature. The poetic title is not so much the Meteorological Bureau, but rather the literary giant Yasunari Kawabata.
Yasunari Kawabata was selected for the Nobel Prize, and like the Chinese writer Mo Yan, he wrote about a kind of "root" that belongs to this soil. When Yasunari Kawabata received the award, he was given the opportunity to "maintain and inherit a purely traditional Japanese literary model." In the narrative technique, one can find a kind of poetic with a delicate charm". In the opening part of this series of "Japanese Literature and History", I have revisited the "snow" written by Yasunari Kawabata. As half of the Nobel Prize for Japanese literature, Yasunari Kawabata's oriental beauty is vividly reflected in his works. It seems that the snow is the scenery, but the writing is lonely. "Snow Country" is just a stage, but it carries the loneliness of the writer. This is my consistent experience when I read Yasunari Kawabata. From Yasunari Kawabata's perspective, I saw the beauty of Japan and mastered the tools to write about beauty. Through beauty, Yasunari Kawabata tells the world that Japanese writing is beautiful, while Japanese literati have the poignancy of "loneliness".
Mr. Lin Shaohua, a Chinese translator, once used the phrase "the premise of beauty is cleanliness, the ultimate of beauty is sorrow, the maintenance of beauty is futile, and the destination of beauty is nothingness" to explain Kawabata's "beauty". Half Buddhism, half Zen Buddhism, intertwined with the beauty of Japan, often accompanied by loneliness on the island, but written into a classic by a master like Yasunari Kawabata. The silent scene under the snow, the melancholy people in the scene, and the "futility" love between people are all the life of Yasunari Kawabata, and it is also the loneliness of the Japanese literati. In the novel "Snow Country", there is no story of ups and downs, and it is even extremely bland, but it has taken 14 years from the author's writing to writing. If you don't have something that impresses, it's hard to continue. "Snow Country" became one of Kawabata's main works to win the Nobel Prize, and it also made the literary world feel Japan's unique "loneliness".
Yasunari Kawabata's background comes with "loneliness". Although her father is a doctor and her mother is the daughter of an industrialist, she can be called a "good hand" from the current point of view. However, Yasunari Kawabata was born prematurely, his parents died of illness before the age of 3, and he was adopted by his grandparents, and he continued to attend the funerals of his relatives since he was a child, becoming a "celebrity of funerals". He experienced both loneliness and witnessed loneliness. In his own words, his childhood experience gave me a sense of nothingness. In the novel "Ancient Capital", he wrote, "Perhaps luck is short-lived, but loneliness is long-lasting." This sentence can be said to be the background color of Kawabata's literature, and it is also a footnote to his life.
History always arranges fantastic encounters. The "lonely" Western Nobel Prize-winning writer Marquez is a "fan" of Yasunari Kawabata, who not only quotes Yasunari Kawabata's verses in his own works, but also explains his views on Japanese writers who are obsessed with "death" in "Back to the Seeds". In the finale of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez wrote, "Wherever you go, you should remember that the past is fake. Memories are an endless road, all the past springs no longer exist, and even the most tenacious and crazy love is, in the final analysis, just a fleeting reality, only loneliness and eternity." Márquez believes that "the enemy of loneliness is love", but anyone who wants to get rid of loneliness eventually returns to the origin of loneliness and finally dies of loneliness. Unlike Marquez's "loneliness", Yasunari Kawabata's loneliness is the "synaesthesia" of Japanese literati, or "common disease".
Yasunari Kawabata ended his life with gas in his old age. In addition to him, there are not a few Japanese writers who choose to commit suicide, and only those who remain in literary history are Yukio Mishima, Osamu Dazai, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Takero Arishima and other celebrities. There is the vague anxiety about the future, there is "I am ashamed to be born as a human being", and there is "the darkest train of thought in the world", the essence of which is the loneliness of life. The most special "loner" is undoubtedly Yasunari Kawabata, who has no words or words left behind him, and in the end of his loneliness, he practiced what he said, "Suicide without a suicide note is the best." Death without words is infinite life. ”
Just like the protagonist in the novel "Snow Country", he travels alone in the Japanese archipelago, with a sentimental and lonely character, encounters forbidden love and fatalistic death, and becomes the "blank space" of Japanese literati in the lonely world. Even Kenzaburo Oe, another Nobel Prize-winning writer who depicts "self-redemption" from different perspectives, uses the richness and delicacy of the Japanese to construct "loneliness" in works such as the novel "The Luxury of the Dead". I would even like to say that there is no loneliness, no Japan. I can't tell whether Japan has made lonely literature or loneliness has made Japanese writers.
Let's go back to Yuzawa. I have visited Yuzawa many times, and I walked one foot deep and shallow foot in the knee-deep snow from the station to the town's hot spring inn "Takaban", where Yasunari Kawabata wrote "Snow Country" at the time, and the room "Kasumima" is still in its original state, and it is open to overnight guests like a miniature museum. In winter, when the outside of the inn is covered with heavy snow, the tatami mats, small stoves, and Japanese floor lamps form a still painting. In the white world where the field of vision is not far away, what the author can see is the loneliness of talking to himself in the heaven and earth.
Some people say that loneliness is the "Taisho style" and "Showa style" of Japanese literature, and it has the limitations of the times. Not really. Loneliness, from Japanese literature, has long since moved to the real world, and is becoming a kind of "cultural business card" of Japan. When Barcelona-based photographer Paola Zanni visited Japan, she took a series of photographs titled "Japanese Loneliness - Ambiguous Loneliness", which recorded the unique "beauty of loneliness" in Japanese society. Whether it is a text or a camera, the end of loneliness is a person's taste of life.
I suddenly remembered Lin Yutang's "split" of "loneliness": when the word loneliness is taken apart, there are children, melons and fruits, dogs, mosquitoes and flies, which are enough to support the mouth of an alley in a midsummer evening, full of human feelings. Under the childish melon and willow shed, in the narrow alley where the thin dog chases the butterfly, the world is prosperous and laughing, but I have two sideburns to spare. Children, fruits, cats, dogs, flies, and flies are of course lively, but they have nothing to do with you, which is called loneliness. Looking at it this way, Kawabata Yasunari and other Japanese writers, although they show the world the ethereal loneliness, have won a full reputation because they have written the fireworks and mood of this society behind them. (Written on May 17, 2024 in Rakuhosai, Tokyo)