Dandelions

by Yasunari Kawabata

  “It’s a clinic, after all.”

  “I was imagining her drifting off and then dreaming of you or me — well, less a real dream than a sort of mixture of dreams and reality.”

  “I doubt the medicine lets her dream.”

  “Is that true?” Kuno said, his dissatisfaction evident in his tone. “I’d like her to dream.”

  “That would be too terrible for her. Think how desolate and lonely she’d feel when she woke up after a dream about you. It would be too much to bear.”

  She had a point. It was Ineko’s first night at the madhouse. She was lying there in the dark, crazy women sleeping all around her. None of them were young and beautiful like her; they filled the air with the grimy old smell of the mad. Perhaps they snored, grinding their teeth, or talking in their sleep — and not the way other people did. The tatami had been stripped of their borders and felt puffy underfoot; the crazies had pulled at them so much that they had gotten nappy. Since it was winter there would be no owls hooting, but the wild-growing, now leafless oaks would emit a quiet creak each time the wind blew, no matter how softly. However lonely or forlorn she felt, she wouldn’t be allowed to turn on a light for herself, or to get up and move around.

  Still, Kuno hoped that Ineko would dream. If he slept himself, he was sure he would see her in his dreams. He couldn’t help feeling, too, that Ineko was bound to dream, even if they’d given her enough sleeping pills to keep her from dreaming. He had the sense that Ineko was more inclined than most to dream.

  Thinking these thoughts, Kuno stared up at the old naked bulb above his futon. He gazed at it so long that it blinded him, even though the illumination wasn’t all that bright — and now he couldn’t see anything else. Just then, a peach-colored arc appeared, stretched like a rainbow across his blurry field of vision.

  “Ineko!” Kuno cried out.

  When had that been — the time Ineko told Kuno that while she was looking at him, a pink rainbow-like arc had appeared before him. She had described that rainbow in the most lovely way. It was a collection of tiny bubbles. The bubbles were pink, and touched by a faint light. They moved about very slowly. Each bubble moved on its own, and yet there was nothing chaotic about the rainbow as a whole. Ineko had described it all in such lovely detail. The fact that the rainbow came so unexpectedly made the odd scene she described sound very lovely. And she had waited until she settled down to tell him.

  “Ah! I can’t see you, I can’t see you!” she had shouted at first. She put her left hand to her forehead and blinked repeatedly. “Your shoulders are gone. Oh, and your mouth, and your chin.”

  From his mouth on down — his shoulders, his chest — Kuno had slowly faded away into nothing. And then, in the void he left behind, a vague arc had shimmered into view, gradually assuming the form of a pink rainbow made of bubbles. Ineko’s terror was lessened somewhat by the wonder she felt at the sight of the rainbow.

  Kuno and Ineko hadn’t been embracing then. They were apart. Kuno was standing near the window. Ineko was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. They were in Kuno’s apartment. It was on the fourth floor. The window faced west, but the day was too cloudy for a typical late-autumn sunset; the gray sky made the window look dim. They hadn’t thought to turn on the lights. The pink of the bubbly rainbow wasn’t particularly intense, but it shone with a pale light that brightened the area around it. The impression it made on Ineko was both soft and sharp.

  “You’re riding a rainbow,” Ineko said.

  Kuno was standing, not in the rainbow, but beyond it. The rainbow hovered between the two of them, but much closer to Kuno than to her. Everything from his shoulders — in fact even from his mouth on down — had vanished into the rainbow. The rainbow-shaped band of bubbles looked as though it ought to be transparent, as though it shouldn’t conceal what lay behind it, so it would have been quite natural for Ineko to be uneasy and frightened about her inability to see Kuno’s body. But the odd beauty of the rainbow distracted her.

  Kuno couldn’t see the pink rainbow in front of him. He had no sense that he was riding on a pink rainbow, as if he were some sacred being not of this world, perched on a purple or multicolored cloud. He only knew about all this from what Ineko told him. He wasn’t all that surprised by the vision, or the partial blindness, Ineko had experienced. Because several times already she had stopped seeing his body while they embraced.

  Still, this was the first time she had stopped seeing him when they weren’t together in that way. It seemed possible to Kuno that her somagnosia had gotten worse. But neither of them were in a state of excitement, as they were when they lay together, and perhaps on account of the rainbow Ineko didn’t tremble the way she did when he held her. She gazed in rapture at the rainbow and at the upper half of Kuno’s face, her eyes seemingly all pupil.

  “Is the rainbow still there?” Kuno asked after a few moments.

  “Yes.” Ineko spoke as if there were nothing odd in this, which Kuno found odd.

  “Is it pretty?” Kuno asked, as gently as he could.

  “Very pretty,” Ineko replied, as if she were half dreaming and half awake. “So this is the kind of man you are. I feel I’ve understood you now.”

  “What kind of man am I?”

  “The kind of man I’m seeing right now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re seeing. How do I look?”

  “You don’t need to know. You’re not looking at yourself — it’s me looking at you, and getting a sense of the kind of man you are.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve seen this sort of rainbow, Ineko? Including the times when you weren’t with me?”

  “Yes, it is,” Ineko said simply. “This is the first time.”

  Kuno began to think Ineko wasn’t her usual self. He had to call her usual self back. What would happen to her if he allowed her to go on seeing these illusions too long?

  “Seeing you like this, I realize I shouldn’t be doing those things we do,” Ineko said, seemingly to herself. And then she blushed.

  Kuno was shocked. “Ineko.”

  “Yes?”

  Kuno rose and walked over to Ineko, grasped her shoulders, and shook her. “There’s no rainbow here.”

  “I know that,” Ineko said, as if it had nothing to do with her. “But it was lovely.”

  “Put your arms around my shoulders. I’m here, right?”

  “You are.”

  Kuno hugged Ineko more tightly and kissed her. Ineko’s soft lips were cold.

  “Is the rainbow there?”

  “It’s gone.”

  The thought occurred to Kuno that now Ineko wasn’t only losing sight of him, she was also seeing pink rainbows which weren’t there. This was more than what had happened before. She said this was the first time such a thing had ever happened, so perhaps this was a second illness, added to the first. Ineko herself might take comfort in this; but it only added to Kuno’s grief.

  Kuno lifted Ineko in his arms and gently lay her down.

  “You could see me? I didn’t vanish?” he asked afterwards.

  “Yes, I could see you,” Ineko answered in the faintest of whispers.

  Ineko didn’t stop seeing Kuno every time he slept with her. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. Neither of them could tell what made her stop seeing him, or what kept that from happening.

  Ineko would cry out and start trembling when she stopped seeing him. There were times when she would cling to him, and times when she would push him away. Ineko herself could not say what made her do one thing or the other. It was rare for her to thrust Kuno away with all her might; when he held her roughly, she would drown all the more deeply in his arms. And yet there were times when she pushed him away. He would stay where she had pushed him. “Can you see me?” he would ask, his voice shaking. “Are you able to see my whole body?” He felt then as if he was tumbling down into a da
rk valley.

  Ineko didn’t keep her eyes open the whole time. Her eyelids would close on their own. That was okay. But it was altogether different when she blurted out, “Ah, I can’t see! I can’t see you!” and then asked him to cover her eyes, and he did so, pressing down on her eyelids with his hand or his lips. She couldn’t see Kuno either way, but when her eyes closed of their own accord she felt as if she could still see him, and when he shut her eyes for her after she had stopped seeing him, then she felt that she really wasn’t able to see him.

  * * *

  * 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 weeks before the Swedish Academy announced that Kawabata would be the first Japanese author — in fact, the first author writing in a non-Western language — to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The translation presented in this book is based, however, not on those installments, but on an edited text of the entire unfinished novel that was printed in a special issue of Shinchō released in June 1972 to commemorate Kawabata’s death, then published in book form, and then included in Kawabata’s collected works. The revisions were made by Kawabata’s son-in-law in accordance with notes Kawabata wrote on pages ripped from the magazine. Needless to say, we have no way of knowing what Kawabata himself might have done with these notes had the Nobel Prize and death not dragged him away from his writing, and had he had an opportunity to expand and revise the manuscript himself. Thus Dandelions remains unfinished not merely in the sense that it does not have an end, but also because entire sections of the existing text were bound to be moved, removed, or rewritten.

  For the most part, the edited text of Dandelions is clean. One sentence allows us, however, a subtle glimpse of the messiness and indeterminacy of the process that created it. Halfway down page 79 in this English translation, we encounter this line: “She was thinking of her lover, Kuno, and how he liked to toy with her hair.” This appears in the midst of the conversation Ineko and her mother have after the ping-pong match during which the teenage Ineko suddenly stops seeing the ball. It seems odd for Ineko to be thinking of Mr. Kuno here, since this scene takes place when Ineko is in eleventh grade, and although we are never told precisely when Ineko and Kuno became lovers, they don’t appear to have been acquainted at this point — on page 92, Kuno reveals his ignorance of Ineko’s ping-ponging, and both he and Ineko’s mother seem to view Ineko’s high school days as part of a past he and she do not share.

  In fact, in the original Shinchō serialization, a full page of additional text separated “She was thinking of her lover, Kuno . . .” from what, in this translation, is the following sentence: “ ‘That’s the sort of girl you were,’ her mother said. Thinking not of Kuno, of course, but of Ineko gathering blossoms.” Kawabata’s son-in-law deleted the passage because Kawabata had marked it with a note saying it “Happens later” (ato no koto). Presumably Kawabata lost track of the complex temporal layering in this part of the novel, and wrote a scene that could not have taken place when it does. The timing of this slip-up, in terms of the novel’s serialization, lends credence to this supposition: a twenty-one month gap separated the thirteenth installment, which ended with Ineko’s mother recalling how reluctant Ineko was to bathe with her after she slept with Kuno for the first time (page 69 of this translation), from the fourteenth, which began with Ineko’s return from the ping-pong tournament (the first line on page 70). According to Kawabata’s son-in-law, this long hiatus in the serialization of Dandelions was largely a result of Kawabata’s hospitalization from January to March, 1966, for a severe case of hepatitis.

  Dandelions is an intense, peculiar book — more so, perhaps, than Kawabata would finally have wanted it to be. It makes me think of a blurry photograph whose streaked colors and lack of clarity call to mind the hands gripping the camera, even though they are not there in the frame. If the cameraman had been able to retake the photo, we would have been left with a sharper, more focused image, but it would not have communicated the same messy, vibrant warmth. The publication of this translation offers us a chance, I hope, to see Kawabata as he has not been seen before in English — less polished, less settled.

  I’ll close with two notes regarding the translation itself. First, a minor but important point: after much discussion with the editor of this book (Barbara Epler, for whose sensitivity and thoughtfulness I am deeply grateful), I decided to have Mrs. Kitao know “how to speak English quite well” on page 22, rather than know “how to speak American quite well.” The reference to “American” seemed liable to confuse readers unduly, or worse yet to register as a sign of puzzling ignorance on either Kawabata’s part or mine. At the same, this one word seems to me to capture something of the atmosphere of the postwar moment Kawabata is describing, and to do so well enough to bear mentioning here. Second, a note about a name: “Mr. Kuno” could also be read “Mr. Hisano,” and is, in fact, in the French translation of this book. I have decided to go with “Mr. Kuno” for two reasons: because it appears to be the more common reading, and because Kawabata counted among his acquaintances the writer Kuno Toyohiko, whose name is written with the same characters. In a sense, it might have been better to take the same route as the French translator, privileging consistency. From another point of view, though, it seems appropriate in the case of this
novel to let the uncertainty stand.

  michael emmerich

  los angeles, october 2017

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Michael Emmerich

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine,

  radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying

  and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Published by arrangement with Chuokoron-Shinsha and the Wylie Agency. This translation is based on the text of Tampopo in Kawabata Yasunari zenshū (Shinchōsa, 1980).

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (ndp1393) in 2017

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kawabata, Yasunari, 1899–1972, author. |

  Emmerich, Michael, translator.

  Title: Dandelions / Yasunari Kawabata ; translated by Michael Emmerich.

  Other titles: Tampopo. English

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014026 | ISBN 9780811224093 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Distress (Psychology) — Fiction. | Desire — Fiction. |

  Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PL832.A9 T313 2017 | DDC 895.63/44 — dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014026

  eISBN: 9780811224109

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

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