kawabata at the cubist turnstile
‘The train stopped at the signal’.[i]
1. turnstile
At the turnstile, a child stares vacuously at faces they do not entirely recognise because the circle of perception lacks a centre. It’s like that with the girl beside him, sitting on the sand at the sunny beach, who gradually lowers her kimono sleeve from her face, permitting his gaze to fall there. Call it a kissing gate. Our purview is that of the polyamorous planarian, possessor of testicles and ovaries, self-fertilist. In asexual
reproduction, the same creature’s tail detaches and both parts regenerate to produce identical selves, neoblasts dividing and differentiating. At the close of the Kawabata story, after the protagonist has completed an historical account of the habit he has formed of staring at the faces of those with whom he shares (or considers himself to have shared) intimate relationship, his eyes return to the downcast face of his newly discovered sweetheart. ‘My face will become less and less novel with each day and night’, she demurs. At the turnstile, entering includes leaving.
2. the ring of hair
His eyes gaze at her future in the light of his past. You’d think that two cannot become one (or one two), but you are mistaken. So it is when the company of soldiers, lumbering over the mountain pass from village to village, encounters groups of young women at each place. The women form an excited phalanx as the jaded men approach their genkans (玄関). One among them, the 12-year-old daughter of a geisha, displays on her finger a gold band set with an opal that matches the pallor of her young skin. At the onsen (温泉) the narrator’s eyes expand in fan-like astonishment at the prepubescent’s disinhibition. Meanwhile, at the nearby ‘little pavilion in the forest’, three adult geishas flash their fans, warding off hovering dragonflies and maintaining their composure. Whether a cherished opal risks tarnishing in bathwater, or the opals of our eyes swell in the presence of special treasure, we are bound to gape at the ‘cleft-peach coiffures’ of the women who gather in large number at the hairdresser’s house, their snipped black hair tumbling into mounds on the otherwise bare timber floor. Proprietary obliges, one in one out.
3. occlusion and the mirror
A photograph is a great tremulation. So it is for the travelling narrator as he gazes through a cleared patch in the window only to be absorbed in a view of luminescent snow. In the same section of glass his attention gets caught by the reflected image of the pretty young woman sitting across from him, oblivious of his split gaze. Her pale skin signifies for him the pure amnesic of fallen snow. Whether ‘etched’ on celluloid or upon the faltering aperture of the human eye, it is the poet who contemplates the pair of figures in the photograph held up before him. Might she be the pretty fiancé and he her
kim pieters, 2021. See remake3)
companion on the very day of their betrothal, those many years ago? Things are trickier for another young woman, in poor health, who in her mind’s eye bathes in the pink of the emotion of the men toward whom she has formed an amorous fancy, even as they are excised from the troubled memory she retains. The present constitutes a remnant of what has been forsaken, whether inadvertently or deliberately. This has been the reality since the days of her
adolescence, when her chest could not so much as bear the tender embrace of any man—or for that matter anyone else—for fear of further impairment. Her life has become one of a vexed correspondence, whereby what is and what might be amount to the same thing. This stands in marked contrast to the poet who with a pair of scissors removes the betrothed from the photograph they occupy together, abandoning the woman of whom I speak, the young man’s arms still wrapped round her middle. For her, the past exists as imposition; for her fiancé, she is abruptly snipped from memory. Life, bestower of images, shimmers in white and pink tones. A train travelling in snow.
moralitas
Like a sparrow blinking in snow, we are hoodwinked and thus we see.
note
[i] Yasunari Kawabata, Palm of the Hand Stories, 1972/88, 229. The text is a distillation in the form of a three-act morality play.