Almost fifty years have passed since Yasunari Kawabata died; a century has gone by since his first story appeared in a school literary magazine. Time has not blunted the weird, unsettling shock of his fiction, as the publication of Dandelions — his last, unfinished novel — so amply demonstrates. It has, however, left us with an image of Kawabata as a writer who would surely have struck many of his contemporaries as subtly off.
It is difficult, confronted by a neat row of translated books, or by the thirty-seven blue-green volumes of Kawabata’s collected works in Japanese, to imagine what it must have been like to follow his career as an author in real time — to read his novels as they were published. In part this is because he lived in a world so different from the one we inhabit today: born six months before the end of the nineteenth century, he was in many ways a creature not simply of the twentieth century, but of its first half. Beyond this, though, there is the mundane and yet in some sense more intractable issue of publication history: the manner in which Kawabata first presented his novels to readers. More often than not, he would give out just a little at a time, serializing, often in different publications, what might at first appear to be discrete stories, only to weave them together, after much rewriting and reorganizing, into a loosely structured novel. Snow Country, which is often considered Kawabata’s masterpiece, was first published in seven installments over two and a half years, from 1935 to 1937, in five different magazines. In 1948, Kawabata published an expanded “final version” incorporating new material he had begun offering to magazines in 1942. And even this turned out to be merely another stage in the novel’s maturation: Kawabata revised the text four more times between 1948 and 1972, and after he died they found, near his desk, an abbreviated version that he had copied out by hand, altering the calligraphic style to suit the prose in each scene.
Kawabata was, one might say, as much a revisionist as he was a novelist: there was always the possibility that a work of his might be unfinalized, reopened, transformed. The ending you knew might not be the ending; there might not be an ending. In this sense, one could perhaps say that Dandelions, the most obviously incomplete of Kawabata’s novels, captures with greater permanence and finality something that was always present in his art. Its provisionality offers us a clearer vision of Kawabata than any of those other translations on the shelf.
Dandelions was first published in the literary magazine Shinchō in twenty-two installments from June 1964 to October 1968, with two long gaps along the way — the first from July 1964 to February 1965, the second from March 1966 to November 1967. The final installment ran in Shinchō just two weeks before the Swedish Academy announced that Kawabata would be the first Japanese author — in fact, the first author writing in a non-Western language — to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The translation presented in this book is based, however, not on those installments, but on an edited text of the entire unfinished novel that was printed in a special issue of Shinchō released in June 1972 to commemorate Kawabata’s death, then published in book form, and then included in Kawabata’s collected works. The revisions were made by Kawabata’s son-in-law in accordance with notes Kawabata wrote on pages ripped from the magazine. Needless to say, we have no way of knowing what Kawabata himself might have done with these notes had the Nobel Prize and death not dragged him away from his writing, and had he had an opportunity to expand and revise the manuscript himself. Thus Dandelions remains unfinished not merely in the sense that it does not have an end, but also because entire sections of the existing text were bound to be moved, removed, or rewritten.
For the most part, the edited text of Dandelions is clean. One sentence allows us, however, a subtle glimpse of the messiness and indeterminacy of the process that created it. Halfway down page 79 in this English translation, we encounter this line: “She was thinking of her lover, Kuno, and how he liked to toy with her hair.” This appears in the midst of the conversation Ineko and her mother have after the ping-pong match during which the teenage Ineko suddenly stops seeing the ball. It seems odd for Ineko to be thinking of Mr. Kuno here, since this scene takes place when Ineko is in eleventh grade, and although we are never told precisely when Ineko and Kuno became lovers, they don’t appear to have been acquainted at this point — on page 92, Kuno reveals his ignorance of Ineko’s ping-ponging, and both he and Ineko’s mother seem to view Ineko’s high school days as part of a past he and she do not share.
In fact, in the original Shinchō serialization, a full page of additional text separated “She was thinking of her lover, Kuno . . .” from what, in this translation, is the following sentence: “ ‘That’s the sort of girl you were,’ her mother said. Thinking not of Kuno, of course, but of Ineko gathering blossoms.” Kawabata’s son-in-law deleted the passage because Kawabata had marked it with a note saying it “Happens later” (ato no koto). Presumably Kawabata lost track of the complex temporal layering in this part of the novel, and wrote a scene that could not have taken place when it does. The timing of this slip-up, in terms of the novel’s serialization, lends credence to this supposition: a twenty-one month gap separated the thirteenth installment, which ended with Ineko’s mother recalling how reluctant Ineko was to bathe with her after she slept with Kuno for the first time (page 69 of this translation), from the fourteenth, which began with Ineko’s return from the ping-pong tournament (the first line on page 70). According to Kawabata’s son-in-law, this long hiatus in the serialization of Dandelions was largely a result of Kawabata’s hospitalization from January to March, 1966, for a severe case of hepatitis.
Dandelions is an intense, peculiar book — more so, perhaps, than Kawabata would finally have wanted it to be. It makes me think of a blurry photograph whose streaked colors and lack of clarity call to mind the hands gripping the camera, even though they are not there in the frame. If the cameraman had been able to retake the photo, we would have been left with a sharper, more focused image, but it would not have communicated the same messy, vibrant warmth. The publication of this translation offers us a chance, I hope, to see Kawabata as he has not been seen before in English — less polished, less settled.
I’ll close with two notes regarding the translation itself. First, a minor but important point: after much discussion with the editor of this book (Barbara Epler, for whose sensitivity and thoughtfulness I am deeply grateful), I decided to have Mrs. Kitao know “how to speak English quite well” on page 22, rather than know “how to speak American quite well.” The reference to “American” seemed liable to confuse readers unduly, or worse yet to register as a sign of puzzling ignorance on either Kawabata’s part or mine. At the same, this one word seems to me to capture something of the atmosphere of the postwar moment Kawabata is describing, and to do so well enough to bear mentioning here. Second, a note about a name: “Mr. Kuno” could also be read “Mr. Hisano,” and is, in fact, in the French translation of this book. I have decided to go with “Mr. Kuno” for two reasons: because it appears to be the more common reading, and because Kawabata counted among his acquaintances the writer Kuno Toyohiko, whose name is written with the same characters. In a sense, it might have been better to take the same route as the French translator, privileging consistency. From another point of view, though, it seems appropriate in the case of this novel to let the uncertainty stand.
michael emmerich
los angeles, october 2017