Thousand Cranes (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Yasunari Kawabata

One of the girls was beautiful. She carried a bundle wrapped in a kerchief, the thousand-crane pattern in white on a pink crepe background.

And one saw a thousand cranes, small and white, start up in flight around her.

Kikuji sensed that Mrs Ota was talking of her own love as she talked of the girl. She seemed to be pleading something with all the passion she had, and in its final implications the plea did not seem to make a distinction between Kikuji’s father and Kikuji himself. There was a deep, affectionate nostalgia in it, as if she meant to be talking to Kikuji’s father. The hostility which Kikuji, with his mother, had felt for Mrs Ota had lost some of its strength, though it had not entirely disappeared. He even feared that unless he was careful he might find in himself the father loved by Mrs Ota. He was tempted to imagine that he had known this woman’s body long ago.

Mrs Ota was at least forty-five, some twenty years older than Kikuji, but she had made him forget her age when they made love. He felt that he had had a woman younger than he in his arms. Sharing a happiness that came from the woman’s experience, Kikuji felt none of the embarrassed reticence of inexperience. He felt as if he had for the first time known woman, and as if for the first time he had known himself as a man. It was an extraordinary awakening. He had not guessed that a woman could be so wholly pliant and receptive, the receptive one who followed after and at the same time lured him on, the receptive one who engulfed him in her own warm scent.

And there was a feeling of the maternal about her.

The poison disseminated by Kikuji seemed to have had no effect. It flowed back to Kikuji himself.

Quite aside from the question of the miai, she was his father’s woman. But he had until then felt neither regret nor revulsion.

Some two weeks later, the Ota girl called on Kikuji.

seeing the image of the mother in the daughter.