Book Review: Beauty and Sadness

What gripped me about this novel originally was mostly the title. I’d wanted to read Yasunari Kawabata, and when Penguin was kind enough to send me this book after I inquired after it, I made it my first read of his.

One of the problems with the Japanese fiction that I’m reading is that a lot of them are written and published in the fifties and sixties, which is easy to forget because the time period isn’t expressed with a tremendous amount of importance. But the reason this is a problem is that with Kawabata especially is that one of his consistant themes seems to be comparing issues of the traditional versus the modern. So I begin thinking in terms of the noughties, whereas it’s actually fifty or sixty years back. 

I digress. Beauty and Sadness follows Oki Toshio, a Japanese writer who has a reunion with an ex-lover, Otoko Ueno, who is now an artist and somewhat of a recluse. Itis a novel of remarkable stillness and beauty. I found this in The Sound of the Mountain to an extent as well, but it’s much more prevalent here. Permit me to use an analogy: Kawabata’s writing is like a still lake that is full of life. You know there is life in it, the fish are alive and healthy and strong, the plants are growing, there is a whole ecosystem in balance. But you don’t see that when you are on the bank, you see a body of water. Imagine this life stirring, but no ripples forming on the surface of the lake. His writing is like that. There are events that enfold and emotions and circumstances, but he writes so peacefully and almost passively. I feel like you’re expected to use your imagination a lot more to fill in the blanks and insert colour into the picture you’re provided with, and I think that’s quite lovely.