R’s Reviews > First Snow on Fuji > Status Update

Her Husband Didn't - Another sad and slightly twisted tale, but this time about a middle-aged woman having an affair with a young man who's around the same age as her dead daughter - this last she likes to keep reminding him of. This young man has an earlobe fetish as well. The story concerns the impossibility of their kind of love, and documents the slow and quiet disintegration of their relationship.

'Silence' - Easily one of Kawabata's best, and most surreal. At one point he very delicately traces Borgesian territory in an exploration of themes of authorial intent and memory. The most unnerving moments though were firstly the woman's ghost that bookends the story and the seriously strange and borderline incestuous relationship between the paralysed writer and his daughter. There's so much here to savour.

First Snow on Fuji - A sad affair all around. Two former lovers (one going through a divorce) spend the day together in a country spa. There is tension (sexual or otherwise) running through both the spoken dialogue and inner voices, and themes of regret and nostalgia and a hopeless longing to change the past dominate much of their conversation. This dreary picture is tied back to Mount Fuji, seen from their room.

Chrysanthemum in the Rock - Kawabata is waffling here; less a story and more of a shoddy tour guide of Buddhist gravestones and shrines. It's not even imaginatively written, save for the very beginning and end where our narrator recalls the titular rock in question and its relationship to a deceased woman who's said to haunt the area. I wanted more of that.... but instead I got, well, this very forgettable dross.

Raindrops - Another domestic episode, this time concerning tenants separated by thin paper walls and one particularly awkward woman with issues we can only infer. At one point, said woman casually tells her co-tenants that whenever she hears an ambulance's siren, she wishes it was bound for her husband involved in a car crash. Yikes - and the co-tenants know it too, marked by the ellipsis Kawabata inserts: "........"

Nature - Very pretty good. From obscure scrapbook entries at a seaside inn like "solitary shadow waiting in stillness for snow", to a beautiful actor who became a woman to avoid being drafted. And then we have the story of the ninety-seven year old - dead without dying - calling out to the ghost of a man who hasn't even died yet. The symbolism here is slightly cryptic, but it's all so wonderfully strange.

A Row of Trees - Another one set amidst a suburban family's goings-on. I initially groaned at the husband's obsessive-to-the-point-of-autistic musings on the row of trees lining their street, but I grew to admire the story. The symbolic value of the trees doesn't become apparent until the very end; but everything before it, while mostly uneventful, is tinged with Kawabata's special hue of melancholy.

This Country, That Country - Strange, but at the same time not very riveting. It's a brief look into the domestic lives of two neighbours - husbands and wives - but beneath the surface everyone seems to be repressing something.