Thousand Cranes - A Review
This novel was written by Yasunari Kawabata in 1949.
After reading Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, I was eager to read Thousand Cranes, a similarly short novel about ritual, despair, and thwarted love. Whether the tale involves tea or geishas, some kind of disaster awaits at the end of the book.
Apart from disaster, the weight of history is ever present. Like the tea cottage that needs constant airing, that history can be suffocating and overbearing. We can't choose our parents, and (echoing the thoughts of Philip Larkin that 'they f*ck you up') neither can we choose the problems we inherit from them. Kawabata has gone on record stating that this is a negative novel, and the guilt Kikuji and Fumiko feel is as tragic as it is unwarranted. They have been left down by the older generation, and the intervention of Chikako, the one-time mistress of Kikuji's father, shapes the fate of the two young protagonists for the worse.
Bitter history
Chikako is a compelling character. She is steeped in history - the personal, bitter kind. Slights are not forgotten, and she seems to be minded to settle scores from the past and extract what she believes to be hers from the present, no matter the cost. Kawabata's aim with the novel was to show how the once noble tea ceremony had become something vulgar. It is interesting, then, that Chikako is often the master of tea ceremonies, and the one who airs out the aforementioned tea cottage. Reading the book, one gets the sense that the history of the items used in the tea ceremony is as hollow for the reader as it is for the characters. For us, footnotes give dry, passing mentions to items in the story, and for the protagonists, historical cups and plates are painful reminders of familial mistakes.
In fact, people are objectified in the book. Kikuji and Fumiko develop something of a trauma bond, set against a backdrop of people seeing each other and thinking of someone else. People and objects lose any intrinsic merits or interest. Instead, they become haunting symbols of melancholy and loneliness.
This effectively written and sparse novel is worth the short time it takes to read. Kawabata does enough to build a sober yet vibrant world.
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Cover from the Vintage edition of the novel.
