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| 19th-c rendering of Noh drama. |
Our May 22nd
meeting was devoted to Kawabata’s short story “First Snow on Fuji,” in which
two former lovers, Jiro and Utako, reunite to take an overnight journey to
Hakone, located in an area famous for its mineral baths.
Their
relationship years earlier during the Second World War had resulted in the
birth of a child, who was put up for adoption and then died. When Jiro and Utako talk about the child on
their journey to Hakone, Utako, the mother of the child, appears to have
repressed the memory altogether. Jiro,
on the other hand, is ridden with guilt.
At one point in the conversation he blurts out, “We killed that child,”
and immediately afterwards regrets having said it.
One of our
participants pointed out a moving passage later in the story. During the war,
Jiro fled Tokyo and rented a room in the nearby countryside, in Musashino. A
teacher of Noh chanting had also relocated to Musashino, and gave lessons to the
priest of the local temple. Noh is an ancient Japanese performance art that
combines singing, instrumentation, dance, and drama. Jiro enjoyed watching their rehearsals.
He tells
Utako, “It struck me as peculiar and also as pretty amazing that they would go
on hitting drums and playing flutes even as we were losing the war, you
know? I mean – there probably wasn’t
anything else they could do, but still … you and I didn’t even have enough
willpower left to think like that – to realize that there was nothing left for
us to do but play our flutes.”
Utako
replies, “…you and I should have been playing our flutes together. Things ended
up like this because we weren’t.” (Michael Emmerich translation)
