Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

Author:Yasunari Kawabata
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141950228
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-11-26T17:00:00+00:00

2

Fumiko brought in two bowls on a tray.

They were cylindrical, a red Raku and a black Raku.

She set the black before Kikuji. In it was ordinary coarse tea.

Kikuji lifted the bowl and looked at the potter’s mark. ‘Who is it?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Ryōnyū,2 I believe.’

‘And the red?’

‘Ryōnyū too.’

‘They seem to be a pair.’ Kikuji looked at the red bowl, which lay untouched at her knee.

Though they were ceremonial bowls, they did not seem out of place as ordinary teacups; but a displeasing picture flashed into Kikuji’s mind.

Fumiko’s father had died and Kikuji’s father had lived on; and might not this pair of Raku bowls have served as teacups when Kikuji’s father came to see Fumiko’s mother? Had they not been used as ‘man-wife’ teacups, the black for Kikuji’s father, the red for Fumiko’s mother?

If they were by Ryōnyū, one could be a little careless with them. Might they not also have been taken along on trips?

Fumiko, who knew, was perhaps playing a cruel joke on him.

But he saw no malice, indeed no calculation, in her bringing out the two bowls.

He saw only a girlish sentimentality, which also came to him.

He and Fumiko, haunted by the death of her mother, were unable to hold back this grotesque sentimentality. The pair of Raku bowls deepened the sorrow they had in common.

Fumiko too knew everything: Kikuji’s father and her mother, her mother and Kikuji, her mother’s death.

And they had shared the crime of hiding the suicide.

Fumiko had evidently wept as she made tea. Her eyes were a little red.

‘I’m glad I came today,’ said Kikuji. ‘I could take what you said a few minutes ago to mean that between the living and the dead there can be no forgiving and not forgiving; but I may think instead that I’ve been forgiven by your mother?’

Fumiko nodded. ‘Otherwise Mother can’t be forgiven. Not that she could forgive herself.’

‘But in a way it’s rather terrible that I’m here with you.’

‘Why?’ She looked up at him. ‘You mean it was wrong of her to die? I was very bitter myself – I thought that no matter how she had been misunderstood, death could not be her answer. Death only cuts off understanding. No one can possibly forgive that.’

Kikuji was silent. He wondered if Fumiko too had pushed her way to a final confrontation with the secret of death.

It was strange to be told that death cut off understanding.

The Mrs Ota whom Kikuji knew now was rather different from the mother Fumiko knew.

Fumiko had no way of knowing her mother as a woman.

To forgive or to be forgiven was for Kikuji a matter of being rocked in that wave, the dreaminess of the woman’s body.

It seemed that the dreaminess was here too in the pair of Raku bowls.

Fumiko did not know her mother thus.

It was strange and subtle, the fact that the child should not know the body from which she had come; and, subtly, the body itself had been passed on to the daughter.

From the moment she had greeted him in the doorway, Kikuji had felt something soft and gentle.

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