Kyoto and a Story
Kuwabata portrays a post war Kyoto with a busy cultural life, but signs of modernity loom. Some festivals have been cut back due to the economy and proprietors of traditional family businesses worry about the future. Through the daughter of a textile wholesaler and her sister the issue of class is introduced.
I thought the ideas were more powerful than the prose. Kawabata gives some good descriptions of Kyoto, its festivals, the geisha and the life in the cedar groves that surround the city. He seems to be saying something about traditional life, family ties and class. What comes through is good, but was too subtle for me to fully understand.
The Cold Capital
The aesthetic distance of Kawabata's "Snow Country" is revisted here, in "The Old Capital". The mysterious inner world of twins torn asunder before they knew it-then, by chance reunited is the central story line of this strangely quiet, beautiful book. Kyoto is the "Old Capital" and retains the physical and phsychic remnants of the Heian period.
Within the pages you travel close enough to the main figures to look them in the face, and deep within their eyes, but recognize that, ultimately, they are unknowable in some deep way-that the human heart has mysteries that cannot be solved. Even in translation, this book communicates an aesthetic sadness, a "mono-no-aware" sense of the fleeting beauty of falling cherry blossoms.
Getting to know Chieko
As I've recently visited Kyoto, I really should read this book again. I have not read the book recently, but the imagery conjured from the prose is quite fresh in my mind. I've only read a translation; I can only imagine how lovely it must be in the original Japanese.
It's just a few days in the life of a girl (young woman) Chieko. There is no plot as such, and in someways it feels like it's an excerpt from a wider story. You become acquainted Chieko and her feelings, and there's a beauty in that. There is an event in the book which is referred to in other people's reviews. However I just don't feel comfortable getting you to think of what you can expect. This is a book for being in the moment with Chieko. Though I remember not being particularly enamoured by the first two pages. I'm glad I perservered past them; she's really very likeable.
An Exquisite Novel
The Old Capital, though mentioned along with Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes in the announcement of Kawabata's Nobel Prize in literature, is not as well-known as either of the other two. Yet it is my favorite of his novels.
Kawabata explores the distances between people, the differences between them, the value of tradition, and the difficulties of knowing in his narration of Chieko's discovery of her twin sister, from whom she was separated shortly after birth by a kidnapping - or was it by an abandonment?
I neither speak nor read Japanese, but J. Martin Holman's translation must be a good one. Virtually every page held me entranced with its beauty.
The Old Capital
If you read for plot, this book isn't for you. The fairly dramatic plot (twins separated at birth by a kidnapping)seems almost an aside to the poetic, carefully crafted descriptions of Kyoto life- lanterns, fire flies, cherry blossoms, kimonos. This book will bring you into a world of the perfect beauty and harmony epitomized in Japanese culture and design. The sadness, confusion and longing experienced by the charaters is made particularly poignant by this backdrop of aesthetic perfection and order. Your focus will be on the beauty of the book's descriptions, but it is somehow these descriptions which leave you saturated with the emotions experienced by the characters.
(10 reviews)
