Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata

Author:Yasunari Kawabata
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811224109
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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* Please see the translator’s afterword regarding some temporal inconsistencies in the pages that follow.

Translator’s afterword

Almost fifty years have passed since Yasunari Kawabata died; a century has gone by since his first story appeared in a school literary magazine. Time has not blunted the weird, unsettling shock of his fiction, as the publication of Dandelions — his last, unfinished novel — so amply demonstrates. It has, however, left us with an image of Kawabata as a writer who would surely have struck many of his contemporaries as subtly off.

It is difficult, confronted by a neat row of translated books, or by the thirty-seven blue-green volumes of Kawabata’s collected works in Japanese, to imagine what it must have been like to follow his career as an author in real time — to read his novels as they were published. In part this is because he lived in a world so different from the one we inhabit today: born six months before the end of the nineteenth century, he was in many ways a creature not simply of the twentieth century, but of its first half. Beyond this, though, there is the mundane and yet in some sense more intractable issue of publication history: the manner in which Kawabata first presented his novels to readers. More often than not, he would give out just a little at a time, serializing, often in different publications, what might at first appear to be discrete stories, only to weave them together, after much rewriting and reorganizing, into a loosely structured novel. Snow Country, which is often considered Kawabata’s masterpiece, was first published in seven installments over two and a half years, from 1935 to 1937, in five different magazines. In 1948, Kawabata published an expanded “final version” incorporating new material he had begun offering to magazines in 1942. And even this turned out to be merely another stage in the novel’s maturation: Kawabata revised the text four more times between 1948 and 1972, and after he died they found, near his desk, an abbreviated version that he had copied out by hand, altering the calligraphic style to suit the prose in each scene.

Kawabata was, one might say, as much a revisionist as he was a novelist: there was always the possibility that a work of his might be unfinalized, reopened, transformed. The ending you knew might not be the ending; there might not be an ending. In this sense, one could perhaps say that Dandelions, the most obviously incomplete of Kawabata’s novels, captures with greater permanence and finality something that was always present in his art. Its provisionality offers us a clearer vision of Kawabata than any of those other translations on the shelf.

Dandelions was first published in the literary magazine Shinchō in twenty-two installments from June 1964 to October 1968, with two long gaps along the way — the first from July 1964 to February 1965, the second from March 1966 to November 1967. The final installment ran in Shinchō just two

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