Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata

Author:Yasunari Kawabata
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2011-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

Still, Otoko had had many opportunities for love and

marriage since coming to Kyoto with her mother. But she had avoided them. As soon as she realized that a man was in love with her, memories of Oki were revived. Rather than mere recollections, they were her reality. When she parted from Oki she thought she would never marry. Distraught by sorrow, she could hardly plan ahead to the next day, much less to the distant future. But the thought of never marrying had crept into her mind, and in time it became an inflexible resolution.

Of course Otoko's mother hoped for her to marry. She had moved to Kyoto to keep her away from Oki, and to calm her, not with the intention of settling down permanently. Even in Kyoto her anxiety over her daughter remained. The first time she brought up a marriage proposal was when Otoko was nineteen. It was at the Nembutsu Temple in Adashino, deep in the Saga plain, on the night of the Ceremony of the Thousand Lights.

Otoko noticed tears in her mother's eyes as she looked at the thousand lights burning before the countless little weathered gravestones, memorials to the unmourned dead, that stood in rows across the gravel bed symbolizing the children's Limbo. A sense of mortality hung in the air. The feeble candle flames flickering there in the dusk made the gravestones seem all the more melancholy.

It was dark as they walked back together along a country road.

"My, but it's lonely," her mother said. "Don't you feel lonely, Otoko?" This time the word "lonely" seemed to have a different meaning. She began talking about a marriage proposal for Otoko that had come by way of a friend in Tokyo.

"I feel guilty toward you because I can't marry," said Otoko.

"There's no such thing as a woman who can't marry!"

"But there is."

"If you don't, we'll both be among the unmourned dead."

"I don't know what that means."

"They're the ones who have no relatives left to mourn them."

"I know, but I can't imagine what that would mean." She paused. "You're dead, after all."

"It's not just when you're dead. A woman without husband or children must be like that even while she's still alive. Suppose I didn't have you. You're still young, but . . . ." Her mother hesitated. "You often paint pictures of your baby, don't you? How long do you expect to go on doing that?"

Otoko did not reply.

Her mother told her all she knew about the proposed marriage partner, a bank clerk. "If you'd like to meet him, let's make a visit to Tokyo."

"What do you suppose I see before me as I listen to you?" Otoko asked.

"You're seeing something?"

"Iron bars. I see the iron bars on the windows of that psychiatric ward."

Her mother was silenced.

Otoko received several more proposals while her mother was alive.

"It's no good thinking about Mr. Oki," her mother said, urging her to marry. It was more an appeal than a warning. "There's nothing you can do. Waiting for Mr. Oki is like wailing for the past — time and the river won't flow backward.

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