Finality, Finance, and Entanglement in Kawabata Yasunari’s Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Its Sequels

Abstract

Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Namichidori (serialized 1953–1954), was still unfinished when Kawabata’s notes were stolen, and he left the text in a state that he himself described as mikan, ‘incomplete’. The seemingly unresolved quality of the text is even more apparent when one considers that the two last-written chapters of Namichidori were subsequently not included in published versions of that text, giving the impression that the sequel to Senbazuru ends inconclusively. The present essay examines the narrative as a whole, inclusive of the two concluding chapters. The theory of finance in literature is applied to a pivotal episode near the end of Namichidori (characters invest in the stock market); and thing theory is used to show that, in crucial ways, the narrative ends conclusively, if all the extant chapters are read as a whole.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s) .

Notes

¹ For a recent reading of Kawabata’s Nobel lecture that situates it in a cold war context, arguing that Kawabata’s works were presented in the West as having an anti-Communist valence, see Bourdaghs, (2016): 204–210. In English, see also Bourdaghs et al. (2018): 3–6.

² I might also mention a famous later reaction to Kawabata’s novel that reads it as a ‘negative work’: the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom’s 1980 novel Rituelen (Rituals), in which a character commits suicide, inspired by a novel by Kawabata – evidently Senbazuru. The character’s body is not found, but – since he is a collector of Japanese tea wares – he symbolizes his own suicide by leaving a shattered tea vessel in his apartment.

³ Elizabeth Lillehoj (2011: 188–194) has written of the connections between the tea ceremony and political machinations in Kyōto in (mostly) the seventeenth century. Kristin Surak’s anthropological study of the ‘markedly traditional formulation of the [Japanese] national essence’ through the tea ceremony (2012: 54) describes at length the importance of tea wares in sustaining that essence (ibid: 34–41). Morgan Pitelka’s examination of the putatively Zen Buddhist elements of the tea ceremony concludes, ‘To totalize tea by subsuming it into the objectives of Zen is to flatten a textured practice’ (2017: 96).

⁴ According to Gunji Katsuyoshi, the theft of Kawabata’s notes was first made public only in 1978, in an article which included a statement by Kawabata’s widow verifying the incident; Gunji adds that this article was the first to clarify why Namichidori was left incomplete (Gunji, 1989: 291). However, the theft was mentioned also in Tsukimura’s (1969) essay, which is certainly earlier than the (1978) article; Tsukimura (1969: 120) indicated that Kawabata himself was her informant.

⁵ Other scholars have analyzed Kawabata’s narrative in light of its representation of the past, but with often markedly different emphases. Fujio’s (2015) recent study, for example, evaluates the extent to which three of the women characters in the narrative resist or embrace a principle of impermanence or mujō; Fujio examines Senbazuru and Namichidori without considering the final two chapters. That latter fact might explain why Fujio largely omits the role of Yukiko from his analysis, who figures crucially in the narrative’s conclusion.

⁶ There are mentions – quite brief – of Namichidori in English in, for example, Tsukimura and Yasunari, (1968): 25–26; Gessel, (1993): 184; and Cassegård, (2007): 146 note 5.

⁷ I have inspected Spanish, French, and Russian translations of Kawabata’s narrative about the tea ceremony, and the Spanish and French that I have seen are limited to the five chapters of Senbazuru. The Russian translation by Rakhim (1999) includes the five chapters of Senbazuru and the first three chapters of Namichidori, but does not include the two concluding chapters.

⁸ The reference ‘S IV.iv, J129/E110’ means: Senbazuru chapter 4 section 4, Japanese page 129 (page number is coded to Kawabata, 1989), English page 110 (page number is coded to Kawabata (1958 [1952]). In the parenthetical notes that are used hereafter, S = Senbazuru and N = Namichidori. When quoting in English from S, I give Edward Seidensticker’s translation; translations from N are my own.

⁹ It bears noting that in the sentences just after the text I have quoted, O’Gorman skeptically questions the scope and applicability of the etymology of finance as a trope for literary analysis.

¹⁰ La Berge emphasizes that the etymological understanding of finance is embedded in a specific historical moment: long ago, La Berge claims, ‘the term finance itself was still able to bridge the intimacy of the feudal scene’, which was predicated on close interpersonal connections between those engaged in a trade, ‘with the finality of the early capitalist transaction: to finance is to go to the end (finir), but of life itself’ (2015: 126). Arne De Boever (2018: 200), commenting on this passage in La Berge, observes too that ‘death may not be finance’s end for everyone: […] the deal is often driven, I have suggested, by an aversion to death – by an obsession with immortality’.

¹¹ The Japanese words most usually translated into English as finance are kin’yū 金融 and the related word yūzū 融通, neither of which imply finality.

¹² For an examination of Senbazuru and Namichidori that considers en in light of the notion of the curse, see Hara, 2012[1987]: 148–153.

¹³ Tegirekin also figures in the novel Yama no oto, in which the protagonist’s son gives tegirekin money to his mistress (in the fourth section of the chapter titled ‘Hebi no tamago’, in Kawabata, 1957 [1954]: 296).

¹⁴ Kawabata, ‘Tsuma no omoi’, 311.

¹⁵ Tsukimura Senko’s 1969 essay on Senbazuru and its sequels is centered primarily on the concept of innen 因縁, a fated connection or an ongoing history of connection. Tsukimura’s essay draws on Senbazuru, Namichidori, and ‘Haru no me’, but does not incorporate ‘Tsuma no omoi’ in its analysis – and therefore concludes that, when the narrative ‘ends’, Kurimoto is still alive and still has Kikuji in her clutches. Evidently Tsukimura was unaware of the existence of the latter, concluding story.

¹⁶ A classic formulation of muen or ‘en-lessness’ is Amino Yoshihiko’s Muen, kugai, raku (1991 [1978]: 3–67), which argues that, in early modern Japan, people in situations of social difficulty could find relief by becoming muen, which entailed seeking sanctuary from en in certain prescribed ways (for example, taking shelter in determined temple grounds). The characters in Kawabata’s narrative are dealing with an en that does not admit of such avenues for escape.

¹⁷ An interesting fulcrum for comparison would be Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the day (1956), in which the protagonist’s misery is figured in the loss of all his investments over the course of a single day. Like Yukiko, Bellow’s protagonist reposed his trust in the stock market; but that character’s money was reduced to nothing, while Yukiko (and by extension Kikuji) is likely to receive consistently sunny reports on their investment for at least the next several decades.

¹⁸ Mark Metzler (2013: 158–172) describes the late 1940s and early 1950s in Japan as a ‘Schumpeterian turning point’, referring to Joseph Schumpeter’s ideas about economic cycles. To be explicit, the turning point in the early 1950s marked a transition to a period of so-called growth in the economy.

¹⁹ It would be hard to argue that Kawabata’s narrative shares a ‘realist impulse to unmask the unreal[ity]’ of a finance-based economy, an impulse that is at the core of what Alison Shonkwiler has called the ‘financial imaginary’ (2017: xv). If Kawabata is lampooning his characters’ faith in the stock market, the critique is ambiguous to the point of inscrutability. The buying of the stocks is only ever mentioned proleptically – we never learn whether Kikuji actually buys the stocks – which may suggest that Yukiko’s broker ends up simply doing what he is supposed to do, just as the market ends up doing what it is (according to Kikuji and Yukiko) supposed to do.

²⁰ Scholarship on Senbazuru (for example, Gunji, 1989; Umezawa, 1998) has tended to overstate the involvement of Kawabata’s widow in the composition of the 1978 article about the theft of Kawabata’s notes. The article (Namichidori mikan no hiwa, 1978) appears to be printed without a byline; at the very end of the article, there is appended a brief statement titled ‘Kawabata Yasunari no fujin Hideko san no hanashi’ (What Kawabata Yasunari’s wife Hideko says). However, this statement is just five lines, three short sentences; it is followed by a similar statement by the painter Takata Rikizō, who allegedly accompanied Kawabata on his 1953 travels to Kyushu. It would seem that the bulk of the article was written by someone other than Kawabata Hideko or Takata Rikizō.

²¹ I will also note that in Matsui’s summaries of other scholars’ theories of materiality, his exemplary object is a magukappu or coffee mug that he bought at Disneyland (2017: 185–195). Not a tea vessel, but too similar to leave unmentioned.

²² In another context, I hope to elaborate on the many resonances between Kawabata’s novel and the American novelist Henry James’s The golden bowl (1904). James’s novel includes a climactic scene in which the titular bowl, a gilt crystal cup, is smashed to pieces.

²³ David Stahl (2017: 50–86) analyzes the events up to the breaking of the Shino bowl, and especially Kikuji’s grief, through the trope of trauma.

²⁴ The ‘life of things’ has been a subject for scholarly inquiry in English since as early as Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume on The social life of things (1986).