Yasunari Kawabata’s Lonely Lake
By Jane McBride
Photography by Kate Lawlor
A friendly face. A spindly, girlish figure, even in old age. That’s what I see in photos of Yasunari Kawabata. He’s always in traditional Japanese clothing that looks loose and comfortable, never a stiff, ugly suit. His smile is soft and shy. For a Nobel Prize winner, he doesn’t look like the kind of guy to take himself too seriously. In his younger portraits, there’s more of a dark, brooding air to him, but even in those he seems shy and curious, not dour or forbidding.
There’s one photograph of Kawabata where he’s posed with both hands holding his face. It’s playfully demure. In front of him is a strange little statue.
There’s many photos of Kawabata with his friend and protégé, Yukio Mishima. They share broad smiles, like they’ve just heard a joke, and in one of my favourites, their foreheads seem to touch.
There’s another photo of him sitting before a crowd of photographers, looking to one side. He seems out of his depth.
I’m writing about him in present tense, because he’s still there in photos. But in the real world, Yasunari Kawabata is long gone.
The first time I tried reading Reiko Tsukimura’s translation of The Lake, I wasn’t ready. I expected something pretty, pure, and delicate. And yes, it has those moments, but always pressed uncomfortably close against ugliness. Everything is impure. It’s meant to be.
The Lake opens with a pathetic creep named Gimpei going to a bath house. Hearing the attendant is from a small town in Niigata, he says, “Ah, the snow country… That’s why your skin is so clear and beautiful.” The young woman instantly replies, “No. It’s not beautiful.” A sad nod to Snow Country?
Snow Country (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker) is Kawabata’s most iconic work. It’s one of the first books I read when I was just getting into Japanese literature, and one I’ll have to reread soon, as my memories of it have become so vague. It’s a beautiful book. Maybe too beautiful. While slim, its sentences are all so powerful that it takes time to absorb each one, like sipping a spirit. When you think of Kawabata, you may picture something like Snow Country, with its refined structure, beautiful geisha, and abstract melancholy. That’s what I picture. But that’s not all there is to him.
The Lake feels like Kawabata is responding to himself. Gimpei’s idealisation of this girl’s hometown is shot down immediately. It could be that she hates that place she came from. Or maybe she does think it’s beautiful, but doesn’t want to share that beauty with someone as repulsive as Gimpei.
What happens when a beautiful time or place gets tainted? What happens when your idea of a beautiful time or place gets tainted?
The bath house scene is full of ethereal images, the kind you’d find in any Kawabata story, but they’re all marred and tainted by Gimpei’s behaviour, his unpleasant scent, his ugly feet, his infected skin. He’s an intruder, and he knows it. He can barely believe he’s there, and knows he shouldn’t be. It’s like Mister Blobby or a Robert Crumb cartoon has barged into a scene from Snow Country, ruining the careful placement of things, making it all fall apart, reminding the reader of all the ugly, pathetic world that exists outside.
More than anything else, Gimpei reminds me of the Ice King from Adventure Time, a pathetic old wizard who talks to penguins and kidnaps princesses. But while Ice King turned out to be sympathetic, even loveable, Gimpei deserves his loneliness. (Ice King eventually reforms and stops kidnapping princesses, while Gimpei never stops stalking.) And that’s terrifying. It makes me wonder if I deserve mine too.
What really made The Lake so difficult to read is my deep fear that I’m just like Gimpei, or that I could become him. The scenes where he tries to get close to a young couple are sinister, but also sad. Whenever I’ve felt isolated or detached from others, I’ve pictured myself as something like Gimpei, someone who shouldn’t be there, and who can never be like those happy people.
In all of Kawabata’s fiction, female characters are depicted simply, but also with longing. Not just a longing for them, but to be like them. I’m probably projecting, but when I read Kawabata’s description of some ethereal beauty, I sense a sadness that comes from knowing you can never be like her. You are not that pretty girl, and never will be. You can never be friends with those people. You can never belong to their little world. You have to stand in the cold, watching them bask in the sunlight.
The Lake’s sadness is inelegant, and intentionally so. Even the prose style here is looser. In Snow Country, every line contains some perfectly crystalised image to contrast with the next one. The imagery in The Lake is no less intense, but diffused through many sentences.
I’ve written before on my Substack about how so much of Kawabata’s imagery is filtered through a lens. Characters observe the natural world’s play of light through glass windows, like the train scenes in Snow Country, Beauty and Sadness, and The Rainbow. Here, we get the same thing, as Gimpei looks out from a taxi window. Its description of the world turned pink and blue is one of the only untainted moments in this story.
When I’m lonely and miserable, I feel like a nearly-drowned rat, pulled out of cold water. The Lake captures that feeling uncomfortably well. Reading it is like coming home to a cold and empty apartment.
