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Kawabata Yasunari: Shock and the Reunion with Inner Nature

hat role does shock play in the writings of the Japanese writer and WNobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari? Benjamin and Kawabata in many respects seem to be situated on the same historical threshold. A keen aware- ness of the threat of shock colors the image of modernity in both writers. At the same time, there are decisive differences between the two. Benjamin sees the heightened consciousness of modernity as originating in the attempt to parry the daily sensations of shock generated by capitalism. Kawabata’s novels bring out the fact that shock also works the other way. For those who are imprisoned in the citadel of identity, even the painful experience of personal disintegration may seem liberating. Not only the disintegration of the aura, but also the breakdown of identity manifests itself as shock, and, to that degree, shock not only forces consciousness away from, but also back to, inner nature. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Kawabata declared that he from now on could write nothing by elegies – or literally, that he ‘could do nothing but return into the sadness of Japan’ (cf. Kawabata 1973c:196). This was an era of cultural ‘Americanization’ and political subordination to the US when Japan’s traditional culture seemed to be in a process of irretrievable dissolution. Most of the novels to which I will refer belong mainly to the postwar period – The Master of Go (1942–54, Meijin), Thousand Cranes (1949–51, Senbazuru), The Sound of the Mountain (1949–54, Yama no oto), The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1960–61, Nemureru bijo), and The Old Capital (1961–62, Koto) – as well as his Nobel lecture ‘Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself’ (1968, ‘Utsukushii Nihon no watashi’). However, Kawabata’s statement should not blind us to the elegiac character even of novels written before the war, such as Snow Country (1935–37, 48, Yukiguni). My reason for emphasizing the novels I have mentioned here, including Snow Country, is that I am anxious to Kawabata Yasunari: Shock and the Reunion with Inner Nature 129 bring into relief a certain view on shock, which seems to be connected to this elegiac character. Below, I shall first describe the aesthetization of shock in the novels of Kawabata. This will involve exploring the formal relationship between their endings and the narrative as a whole, and how this relationship enables them to undermine their own unity. This detour is necessary since I believe that Kawabata’s notion of shock manifests itself not only on the level of the contents of his works, but also in the way that these works are constructed. Secondly, I will attempt to reconstruct the model of the good life that informs his novels. I will argue that Kawabata presents us with an ideal of inner nature, which dispenses with the ideal of authenticity and is animated by the Zen Buddhist notion of nothingness and the aesthetics of mono no aware (‘the sadness of things’).1 Finally, I will attempt to explore the implications of this reconstruction for the problem posed by Benjamin concerning the possibility of experience (Erfahrung) in modern societies.

THE AESTHETIZATION OF SHOCK The novels of Kawabata have been likened to haiku and waka, the tradi- tional seventeen and thirty-one mora poems that achieve their beauty by a mating of opposite or incongruous terms. This is true not only of his style, but also of the overall narrative organization of his novels.2 Impressions and episodes confront the reader as more or less autonomous fragments, each of them emitting a color or fragrance of their own. While each section is embedded in the context of the whole, in each a counter-tendency to free itself from this context is also at work. In contrast to the montage, where unity emerges from the transition between heterogeneous elements, in Kawabata the transitions are disintegrative.3 The final blow to the unity of the novels is dealt by their often abrupt and ‘inconclusive’ endings. With small means, a shift of nuance is brought about that is often so startling that the endings seem to make the context, without which they would be incomprehensible, fall apart. In the endings of novels such as Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Old Capital or The House of the Sleeping Beauties the curious relationship between the whole and the part is heightened to a point where the disintegration of the former becomes a precondition for the beauty of latter. Mishima Yukio once observed about The House of the Sleeping Beauties that ‘the formal perfection’ of the novel consists in the way the woman’s ‘last cruel remark’ at the end, ‘brings down the house of lust, until then so carefully and minutely fabricated, in a collapse inhuman beyond description’ (Mishima 1980:8).4 The special characteristic of endings of this sort is that they brutally replace, rather than conclude the narrative. Their effect is in a sense the effect of shock. By its swift negation of the whole, nothing is left to linger