[SPOILERS]

It took me until nearly 2/3 of the way through Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes to really start getting into it, perhaps because the callow narrator annoyed the hell out of me.

By the end, I wasn’t sure whether I’d read an ‘ordinary’ novel about human relationships — their messiness contrasted with the formalised beauty of the tea ceremony and its paraphernalia (and the reader perhaps encouraged not to judge too harshly but to see the tenderness in a soap opera-ish human tangle?) and the passing of problems from one generation to the next — or one about two haunted tea bowls.

Both, I assume — though I think that how much the ghost story is real and how much metaphorical is left up to the reader (not just the reader’s judgements, but the reader’s tastes and what they would like the book to be?)

In the story’s early stages the attention paid to the tea utensils seems like comfortable territory for a literary novel. They symbolise this and that. Then the attention starts lingering over them (one in particular) to the point of seeming either precious or self-parodying. Then they kind of take over, which made me reassess my reading of the story.

Kikuji and Fumiko, as personalities, both feel like rather ‘empty vessels’, in contrast to Chikako’s awful but alive and self-aware presence. (She also seems to have a meta-awareness of the story, describing herself as the ‘villain’.) At the end, it’s ambiguous as to whether Fumiko has committed suicide or not — but did she just vanish like a ghost after breaking ‘her’ bowl, and is Kikuji’s vanishing into the park also the vanishing of a ghost? He refers to Fumiko as the one ‘who had brought him to life’.

Chikako uses the word ‘witch’ to describe Mrs Ota. In a novel in which every word seems carefully chosen, surely Kawabata had a reason for using a supernatural word like that?

Her birthmark is the sort of thing that characters obsess over in literary novels. In a folk story, though, it might be the mark of a supernatural being, or a witch. But how wicked a witch was she? Was Chikako a villain in the human story, but on another level something more like an exorcist? (Am I speculating too wildly?) At the very end, to Kikuji she is ‘the woman he took for his enemy’. How telling is that ‘took for’?

Layers, textures, invitations to different readings, and effects (hard to pinpoint in words) created by the layers of readings.

Tsukumogami — ordinary objects which acquire souls after 100 years of service (one of my favourite folkloric ideas: see Wikipedia entry for delightful picture). I don’t think the bowls in Thousand Cranes are tsukumogami, just haunted, but their age is emphasised, making me wonder whether their story has been going on for longer than the period of events in the novel.

It’s a short book, and after not digging the first 2/3 I should probably read it again and see if I can get a better idea of what Kawabata’s doing and how he’s doing it.