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Izu Dancer
Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972)
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Kawabata Yasunari as a student in 1917
| The foremost novelist of modern Japan, Yasunari created his own world of Japanese aesthetics by expressing delicate changes in emotions of the characters and clear poetical sentiment through a keen eye of observation. He won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Four years later, he committed suicide at the age of 73.
Izu-no-Odoriko (Izu dancer), Yasunari's early masterpiece, is a love story of a lonely student and a young dancer of an itinerant company whom he meets while traveling around Izu. This novel, full of poetical sentiment, has been brought to the screen several times, attracting much audience each time.
Yukiguni, one of Yasunari's supreme works, is a story of fruitless love between a man tired of life and geisha girl with a snowbound spa as the scene. Each of the elegant sentences within the work represents exquisite beauty of the Japanese language.
Message 1877
Kawabata Yasunari
telescope07
11/12/1999 11:40 am EST
Izu Dancer
A student in Tokyo, 19 years old.
He travels alone in Izu peninsula.
The fourth day, he met a group of wanderer at a teahouse.
A dancer around 17 years old,
she serves a cushion to him.
This story begins from here.
An entertainer was looking down in those days.
Like as a beggar.
A student travels together with this group.
They work in a hot spring in Izu.
He nurses a faint love with a dancer through the travel.
A dancer is familiar with him too.
But at last comes to a separation in Simoda town.
He has to go home to Tokyo.
Each other can't say good-by.
Pushing into their emotion! |
Notes:
Kawabata Yasunari made a trip alone in Izu. At autumn in 1918.
I guess American people can't stand this kind of ending. It is not happy end.
Message 1878
Izu dancer
telescope07
11/12/1999 11:42 am EST
The following is a series of posts over several days presenting excerpts from the novel with pictures of the locations. They were posted to two message boards (post information follows at the end of this re-print).
The Izu dancer (Izu no odoriko)
A shower swept toward me from the foot of the mountain, touching the cedar forests white, as the road began to wind up into the pass. I was nineteen and traveling alone through the Izu Peninsula. My clothes were of the sort students wear, dark kimono, high wooden sandals, a school cap, a book sack over my shoulder. I had spent three nights at hot springs near the center of the peninsula, and now, my fourth day out of Tokyo, I was climbing toward Amagi Pass and South Izu. The autumn scenery was pleasant enough, mountains rising one on another, open forest, deep valleys, but I was excited less by the scenery than by a certain hope.
Large drops of rain began to fall. I ran on the road, now steep and winding, and at the mouth of the pass I came to a teahouse. I stopped short in the doorway. It was almost too lucky: the dancers were resting inside. The little dancing girl turned over the cushion she had been sitting on and pushed it politely toward me. "Yes," I murmured stupidly, and sat down. Surprised and out of breath, I could think of nothing more appropriate to say.
She sat near me, we were facing each other. I fumbled for tobacco and she handed me the ash tray in front of the other women. Still I said nothing.
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She was perhaps sixteen. Her hair was swept up in mounds after an old style I hardly know what to call. Her solemn, oval face was dwarfed under it, and yet the face and the hair went well together, rather as in the pictures one sees of ancient beauties with their exaggerated rolls of hair.
Two other young women were with her, and a man of twenty-four or twenty-five. A stern looking woman of about forty presided over the group. I had seen the little dancer twice before. Once I passed her and the other two young women on a long bridge half way down the peninsula. She was carrying a big drum. I looked back and looked back again, congratulating myself that here finally I had the flavor of travel. And then my third night at the inn I saw her dance. She danced just inside the entrance, and I sat on the stairs enraptured.
On the bridge then, here tonight, I had said to myself: tomorrow over the pass to Yugano, and surely somewhere along those fifteen miles I will meet them- that was the hope that had sent me hurrying up the mountain road. But the meeting at the tea-house was too sudden. I was taken quite off balance.
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| Amagi Tunnel |
Lined on one side by a white fence, the road twisted down from the mouth of the tunnel like a streak of lightning. Near the bottom of the jagged figure were the dancer and her companions. Another half mile and I had overtaken them. Since it hardly seemed graceful to slow down at once to their pace, however, I moved on past the women with a show of coolness. The
man, walking some ten yards ahead of them, turned as he heard me come up.
"You're quite a walker...Isn't it lucky the rain has stopped."
Rescued, I walked on beside him. He began asking questions, and the women, seeing that we had struck up a conversation, came tripping up behind us. The man had a large wicker trunk strapped to his back. The older woman held a puppy in her arms, the two young women carried bundles, and the girl had her drum and its frame.
The older woman presently joined in the conversation.
"He's a high school boy," one of the young women whispered to the little dancer, giggling as I glanced back.
"Really, even I know that much," the girl retorted.
"Students come to the island often."
They were from Oshima in the Ieu Islands, the man told me. In the spring, they left to
wander over the peninsula, but now it was getting cold and they had no winter clothes with them. After ten days or so at Shimoda in the south they would sail back to the islands.
I glanced again at those rich mounds of hair, at the little figure all the more romantic now for being from Oshima. I questioned them about the islands.
"Students come to Oshima to swim, you know," the girl remarked to the young woman beside her.
" In the summer, I suppose." I looked back.
She was flustered. "In the winter too," she answered in an almost inaudible little voice.
"Even in the winter?"
She looked at the other woman and laughed uncertainly.
"Do they swim even in the winter?" I asked again.
She flushed and nodded very slightly, a serious expression on her face.
"The child is crazy," the older woman laughed.
From six or seven miles above Yugano the road followed a river. The mountains had taken on the look of the South from the moment we descended the pass. The man and I became firm friends, and as the thatched roofs of Yugano came in sight below us I announced that I would like to go on to Shimoda with them. He seemed delighted.
In front of a shabby old inn the older woman glanced tentatively at me as if to take her leave.
"But this gentleman would like to go on with us" the man said.
"Oh, would he?" she answered with simple warmth."
"On the road a companion, in life sympathy they say."
"I suppose even poor things like us can liven up a trip. Do come in. We'll have a cup of tea and rest ourselves."
We went up to the second floor and laid down our baggage. The straw carpeting and the doors were worn and dirty. The little dancer brought up tea from below. As she came to me the teacup clattered in its saucer. She set it down sharply in an effort to save herself, but she succeeded only in spilling it. I was hardly prepared for confusion so extreme.
"Dear me. The child's come to a dangerous age," the older woman said, arching her eyebrows as she tossed over a cloth. The girl wiped tensely at the tea.
The remark somehow startled me. I felt the excitement aroused by the old woman at the tea-house begin to mount.
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| Yugano Hot-Spring Inn |
An hour or so later the man took me to another inn. I had thought till then that I was to stay with them. We climbed down over rocks and stone steps a hundred yards or so from the road. There was a public hot spring in the river bed, and just beyond it a bridge led to the garden of the inn.
We went together for a bath. He was twenty-three, he told me, and his wife had had two
miscarriages. He seemed not unintelligent. I had assumed that he had come along for the
walk-perhaps like me to be near the dancer.
A heavy rain began to fall about sunset. The mountains, gray and white, flattened to two dimensions, and the river grew yellower and muddier by the minute. I felt sure that the dancers would not be out on a night like this, and yet I could not sit still. Two and three times I went down to the bath, and came restlessly back to my room again.
Then, distant in the rain, I heard the slow beating of a drum. I tore open the shutters as if to wrench them from their grooves and leaned out the window. The drum beat seemed to be coming nearer.
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| A party and a dancer |
The rain, driven by a strong wind, lashed at my head. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the drum, on where it might be, whether it could be coming this way.
Presently I heard a samisen, and now and then a woman's voice calling to someone, a loud burst of laughter. The dancers had been called to a party in the restaurant across from their inn, it seemed. I could distinguish two or three women's voice and three or four men's voices. Soon they will be finished there, I told myself, and they will come here.
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| A party and a dancer |
The party seemed to go beyond the harmlessly gay and to approach the rowdy. A shrill woman's voice came across the darkness like the crack of a whip.
I sat rigid, more and more on edge, staring out through the open shutters. At each drum beat I felt a surge of relief. "Ah, she's still there. Still there and playing the drum."
And each time the beating stopped the silence seemed intolerable. It was as though I were being borne under by the driving rain.
For a time there was a confusion of footsteps----were they playing tag, were they dancing? And then complete silence. I glared into the darkness. What would she be doing, who would be with her the rest of the night?
I closed the shutters and got into bed. My chest was painfully tight. I went down to the bath again and splashed about violently. The rain stopped, shone crystalline into the distance. I thought for a moment of running out barefoot to look for her. It was after two.
Kawabata Yasunari traveled alone at Izu in 1918, the autumn of his twentieth year. His personal experience was worked up into The memory of Yugashima, which became the legend of "The Izu dancer."
Why did he travel alone? "My disposition is so orphaned and ill-natured with a crooked mind that searching my conscience strictly is unable to bear that suffocating gloom." Then he took a journey at Izu.
Map of the journey according to the novel.
Notes:
Excerpts were presented as the following posts:
Cyber Poet's Niche [1887, 11/16/1999 07:08 am EST]
Pablo Neruda's Poetry Fans [41, 11/18/1999 05:28 pm EST]
Pablo Neruda's Poetry Fans [43, 11/19/1999 11:49 am EST]
Pablo Neruda's Poetry Fans [44, 11/19/1999 01:08 pm EST]
Pablo Neruda's Poetry Fans [46, 11/21/1999 02:51 am EST]
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