the Lake: luminal coin
‘… he had been afraid his arm might crash through the florist’s window, which was as broad as a lake. It was the lake by his mother’s village’[i]
dramatis personae
Gimpei — disgraced teacher, pervert
Miyako, Yayoi, Hisako, Michie — four females he preys upon
Others — appendages
water / miyako
Gimpei bears a peculiar name. His pursuit of random women begins with 25-year-old Miyako, herself a confessed indulger in the art of taking ‘secret pleasure’.[ii] The ¥200,000 discovered inside the ‘blue leather handbag’ she throws at him he discards, as earlier (in chronological time, though later in the novel) he had rejected the ¥270,000 Hisako has pilfered from her parents as a gift to him, while relieving her of her virginity. Moral rectitude is disavowed and instead Kawabata, our weaver of fancies, binds our
tale in Borromean knots, patternings without denouement. Rather than the innate expedience of the female corpus, the quintessence of the novel is concupiscence. Bodies are tangled, messy things. This is made clear in the ‘strange death’ of the father, feared ‘murdered’ by the son, who is found bruised and submerged in the village lake when Gimpei is just ten; and the subsequent relocation and decease of his mother: two precursors to heartache immemorialised. In summer the entire lake surface ignites with intermittent flashes of lightning, while at the shoreline ‘flitting’ fireflies light their own small lamps. The wish to escape is inescapable. After leaving the firefly-catching festival towards the end of the novel, Gimpei meanders over a gothic landscape infused with fabulism.[iii] He believes he is being tracked beneath the surface of the earth by a genderless ‘noseless, mouthless dummy’. It is the newborn he is accused of having fathered while still an undergraduate in the blackened aftermath of Tokyo’s ‘great fire’, a good decade past. Perversely, whereas Gimpei’s deep ache seems forever beyond his grasp, his rival in love, elderly paramour Otoji Arita, straightforwardly buries his own grey face in Miyako’s youthful breasts, designating her ‘mother’. Meaning, alas, is ever fluid.
air / yayoi
Meanwhile, memories of Gimpei’s antagonising of his childhood playmate cousin Yayoi are triggered by the more recent altercations with Miyako and Hisako. His innocent ‘first love’, Yayoi is nonetheless not spared the Gimpei ‘grudge’, and she serves early as an unmattering female hole or repository to be prized open. In a world beset with ensnarement, Gimpei imagines a ‘huge spider’s web’ in which, ‘together with other insects, there were two or three white-eyes trapped’—’slender prisoners’ that, in turn, imprison the wary spider ‘in the middle’ of their own airy castle. In similar manner, the narrative pivots from the travail of one of our young victims to that of another, tipping back and forth, according to Gimpei’s venal bent.[iv] Following the altercation with Hisako, his student, whom he follows home after class as far as her family gate, Gimpei is suddenly distracted at his own reflection seen in the florist’s shop window: the glass reminds him of sweet Yayoi and the lake on which they walked as children, together with his wish that the ice would shatter open and swallow her. Because he ‘felt like dying or killing’—Gimpei resolves inexplicably to stick ‘a needle and some red thread’ through the ear of Yayoi’s pesky small terrier, expecting to incriminate her. You see, she had asked him to dispose of the mouse the dog had killed. But wayward Gimpei is mesmerised by the ’blood trickling from its mouth and its white, clenched teeth just visible’. For the reader this serves as a presentiment of Yayoi’s later sucking ‘a drop of blood’ from ‘her little finger’, when it is pricked by a thorn on a wild goumi bush while she is out gathering red berries. Innocence ingratiates guilt. The same mouse incident is recounted to a bemused fourth and final victim Michie, when Gimpei spots her out walking her dog ‘Fuku’ on a planned rendezvous with her own boyfriend, who promptly shoves Gimpei down the bank. Gimpei, feeling finally secure in a nearby ‘ditch’ that also provides him with an ideal spying posy, hears nearby kittens ‘wailing’ within an abandoned carton box. Sympathising, he realises he is just like them.
fire /hisako
Hisako is his one ‘electrifying contact’. Her soft ‘pink’ cheeks, dimples and simple contentedness cause Gimpei to ‘curse their [all his victims] happiness more than he envied it’. Similarly cursed, our protagonist becomes ‘mysteriously drawn towards the flames reflected in the blackness of the water’ where the ‘depths of his heart [are] lit suddenly’. It’s as if the elements coalesce in confusion. He reflects, ‘I want to follow [them] to the ends of the earth, but I can’t. The only way to chase a person that way is to kill them’. To be sure, one doesn’t know where a single character, scene or occasion ends and another begins. The final love-meeting is an example. Having invited her lover to a ‘secret’ tryst in her bedroom at the family’s new home, Hisako ‘passionately’ avers, while Gimpei cradles her breasts—’You could throttle me’. Not to forgo such an opportunity, Gimpei grasps her neck until ‘his fingertips touched in a circle around it’—mere simulation, of course. In the related ‘wheatfield’ revery, Hisako appears to Gimpei as a bareback rider with a ‘white towel, knotted in the front, around her neck’: grotesquery enfolds what might otherwise be held dear. At another point Gimpei fears ‘he might already have lost both Hisako and Miyako in a world beyond his reach’. At the secret tryst mentioned, Hisako betrays him to her lingering parents, who agonise outside her door; at the same time, she urges Gimpei to flee through her window using ‘two or three sashes’ taken from her chest-of-drawers and strung together—despatching him (at his own wish, as it were) into the underworld, fairyland Rapunzel’s nemesis.[v] Devouring fire erupts: ‘It was as if he himself had been struck by lightning and everything around him had burst with light’.
earth / michie
Yet in the end it is the ‘coldness of the earth’ that prevails. As with Hisako, the tender cheeks and faint aroma of 15-year-old Michie are almost too much to bear for Gimpei who—on first meeting the former—complains of his affliction of ‘diseased’, rank-smelling ‘monkey’ feet. Angels, bitches, ditches, deceptions, enticements—for vexed Gimpei, the girls he hankers after are most advantageously viewed from either atop a grassy mound or within the mouldy confines of a ditch—forever ‘hidden in the grass’ (a death trope). Water fills a hole and it becomes a lake. In the novel, the imagined lure transmutes into a ‘shining stream of time’ wherein having and not having are indistinguishable. No wonder Mizuno, Michie’s boyfriend, tosses the impertinent predator down the bank. Retreating Gimpei, in the safety of his newfound ditch/bitch, ‘gnaws’ at the stone walls and swallows the flowering violet, ‘sad, lost in his own world’.[vi] And so the fireflies that he and Yayoi play with under their mosquito nets at bedtime are identical to those that are celebrated at Michie’s party, where they are caught only to be released again and again, in life’s weird pantomime.[vii] One firefly lodges in Michie’s hair while others are set free from the moat bridge’s ‘low tower built into the water’. Twenty-seven of them are contained in a ‘long, pipe-shaped cage’ Gimpei purchases and attaches to Michie’s belt. Their faint glow trails her as she moves away to take care of an indisposed Mizuno. As Gimpei departs, the frightening dead baby that first appeared in the ‘mirror at the bottom of the bathtub’ at the prostitute’s lodging reappears, matching him step-by-step beneath the earth’s surface. Poor Gimpei, his head thrown up and backwards, ‘felt crushed by the awful mystery of nature, the agony of time’.
moralitas
Emptiness fills, like Kawabata’s intussusception: an ‘entirely one-sided pleasure’.[viii] Dyscrasia and eucrasia comprise a ‘shining stream’ wherein everything is ever only not another. Paragraph, sentence, word—each little knot, unother. ‘A secret, if it’s kept, can be comforting’, Hisako is admonished, ‘but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a
vengeance’. Kawabata reveals that a knot of truth, when undone, has nothing to release. Nonentity Arita, nearing his seventieth birthday, is enabler to both Miyako (his ‘mistress’) and Hisako (who transfers school and graduates only through his direct intervention as ‘chair of the Board of Governors’, at the behest of her father). Insignificance has Keisuke introduce his sister Miyako to Michie (on whom both form romantic crushes) at the very moment that unrelated Gimpei glimpses and adopts her as his ultimate ‘crush’ and ruin. Again, sheer coincidence has Gimpei (through a mutual associate) compose many of Arita’s early business speeches, though not the final threadbare one delivered at Hisako’s graduation. And, in an unforeseen final contrivance, we learn that the debris of the ‘family’s pre-war house’, the place where Hisako and Gimpei often meet furtively becomes—unbeknownst to him—the construction site for an abode that Hisako and her new husband will inhabit together. It has all been an hallucination. Yayoi’s mischievous terrier, memorialised in the dangling red thread, morphs into the playful shiba, the dog that accompanies Michie. This is the tale of an inconsequential mouse whose blood represents a questionable ‘grudge’ against life’s abstract determinations. Circles round on nothing. Tokyo is burning.
notes
[i] Yasunari Kawabata, the Lake (Kodansha International Ltd, 1954/1974), 26. The novel is adapted to a four-part moral allegory. [ii] Four cardinal points in Gimpei’s ‘round’ of life, in chronological order: 1. Neophyte Yayoi at the lake where he grew up; 2. Hisako, his student lover, to whom his first question, at her family’s gate, asks the name of a medicine to treat his ‘athlete’s foot’; 3. Miyako, whose blue leather handbag forms a link between them, hinting a fetish with items of women’s clothing; and 4. Michie, a teenager who is never really within his grasp. In the novel, the round becomes a roulette wheel. [iii] The fourth and final chapter in the novel is a kind of epilogue on directionlessness. Following the translucent account of the firefly-catching party, in which he ’follows’ Machie, Gimpei is cast adrift, without realising it: ‘And as he moved, a baby crawled in the earth beneath him, matching its palms against his as if across a mirror’, 143. The final pages are an incendiary nightmare: ‘It was as though his own feet were no longer treading the face of this earth’, 151. [iv] ‘The hinge [trope] is considered as a paradoxical site of potential...: axels, still points, rotation, oscillation, liminality, translation, transition and trespass’, ‘”The Squeak of the Hinge”: Hinging and Swinging in Woolf and Mansfield’, Gill Lowe <https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781942954088.003.0021, 150–56, June 2016> [v] Considering them a keepsake, Gimpei retains the sashes as a lover’s treasure, only to have Hisako reveal at their final meeting—and parting—that they were dropped from her window by accident. [vi] Miyako, who separately encounters his final target Michie, is similarly ‘deeply moved by her beauty’. Emitting ‘a little cry of joy’, she wonders: ‘Did men follow Michie because they were drawn by a similar yet far more powerful feeling?’, 76. Gender-bender? [vii] Yayoi and Gimpei release captured fireflies within their bed nets in a counting game. Gimpei is surprised at the vivid memory he retains of the ‘splashed pattern’ and 'short narrow sleeves' of Yayoi’s kimono, while having completely forgotten all other details, including those of the two mothers present inside the nets. Elsewhere, too, specific details of clothing or fragrance of a desired female (‘fair skin, ‘white and ruby colours’, ‘beautiful nape of her neck’) are revealed as a synecdoche for that person—or perhaps the lack of the person? [viii] Emily Adlam, ‘”All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments>