thousand cranes

‘Back at its old work, a water jar in a tea ceremony’.[i]

              dramatis personae
                   Mrs Ota – widow, mistress to Morita and Kikuji
                   Fumiko - daughter to Mrs Ota
                    Chikako – mistress to Morita, tea ceremony hostess
                   Yukiko –  omiai, invited by Chikako
                   Kikuji – son to Morita

1. oribe                         

The Inamura girl carries a wrapping cloth of a thousand cranes containing tea utensils. You see, a tea bowl retains nothing; it only signals persistence. Life, too, swills and empties, topples and rights itself. Our first bowl is black oribe, glazed with splashes of white on one side decorated with inky bracken shoots. It fits snugly into Mrs Ota’s diminutive palms,

having earlier passed through those of her husband (deceased), her lover (deceased), and her onetime rival-in-love, Chikako.[ii]  It is the last-named Chikako who has invited the Inamura girl Yukiko to participate in the tea ceremony as well as serve as an omiai (お見合い) for Kikuji, son of the second-deceased. Thus a novel fills. Like a precious bowl, a woman is passed from hand to hand, from man to man. The virtue of the bowl is beyond dispute; it intimates redemption. Yet there is lingering malignancy in Chikako. On a visit with his father to her house, Kikuji had watched her snip coarse black hairs from a palm-sized purple birthmark stretching from her left breast up onto the one on the right. Eight or nine at the time, he gradually metamorphoses into his father, imagining him squeezing Chikako’s clotted birthmark or nibbling at it with his worn out teeth—or else he pictures a half-brother or -sister obliged to suckle there. Chikako, needless to say, is barren: ‘You must hurry and marry Yukiko’, Kikuji is admonished.

2. cylindrical raku

As things transpire, Kikuji is seduced by the other mistress, Mrs Ota—like father like son, ‘an extraordinary awakening’. Prior to her suicide, occurring shortly thereafter, the widow sheds a tear identical to the one which her daughter will shed later in the novel, because neither is ‘yet ready to return from the other world’. Shared as well between

the two women are ‘long neck and full shoulders’ and a pouting lower lip. Our next exhibit, a ‘man-wife’ pair of cylindrical raku, one red one black, bears the insignia of 16th century potter Ryōnyū, and indicates a ‘bond like a curse’.[iii] For Kawabata, the pageantry of the tea ceremony swallows the very procession of lives devoted to it. Fumiko, soon after spilling a tear on the tea kettle’s hot shoulder, staggers before her mother’s lover Kikuji, her long black hair draped onto the floor and encircling the red raku. A mismatching pair of shino bowls is also present. The first serves as a ceremonial water jar that displays Fumiko’s arrangement of ‘white roses and pale carnations’, gifted by Kukuji in memory of the deceased mother. The second shino, still in use as a tea bowl, bears a remnant of Mrs Ota’s lipstick on its brim. The three figures of mother, daughter and mistress coalesce. Inevitably, ‘The pair of Raku bowls deepened the sorrow they had in common’.

3. karatsu / recursive shino

For the widow, the lover is the lover’s father; for the lover, the mother’s daughter is the mother. The third bowl is the interloper karatsu, Korean in origin, cylindrical in shape and swelling towards the base: ‘undecorated, greenish with a touch of saffron and a touch too of carmine’.[iv] Placed alongside our second-mentioned shino with the

incriminating smear, the two karatsu ‘were like the souls of his father and her mother’. ‘As if on a trip’, the children dissolve into a single composite, bearing the emblematic mark of their losses—a ritual reenactment. Like the raku, like all things, the karatsu displaces human sentiment. ‘There is much better shino’, Fumiko murmurs. And it is this ‘better’ shino, bearing the ghoulish lipstick, in which she whisks a final potion for herself and Kikuji. And which, later during the same night, she smashes into five pieces against the stone basin. Here I speak of what is hard to name, almost beyond naming: the contrivance of insatiability: ‘A faint red floated up from the white glaze’. All talk of the marriages of Yukiko and Fumiko is a further contrivance spread by the ‘venomous’ Chikako, our tale’s lone-survivor. Having journeyed long, a final reckoning beckons.

moralitas

‘In a masterpiece, there is nothing unclean’.

notes

[i] Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes, 1952/67. The text is a distillation of the novel into a three-act allegory. Illustrations are taken from the translated version. 
[ii] Seto ware from the 16th century, dating to Momoyama, and the early tea master, Rikyū (1521-91) (織部焼). Mr Ota’s bowl, gifted by his widow to Morita Mitano, is in turn gifted to his mistress Chikako. 
[iii] Kyoto ware, first produced in the 16th century. Ryōnyū (1756-1834) was the ninth master of the Raku kiln (楽焼). The bowls were allowed to be used a little carelessly, for example as a travelling man-wife pair. 
[iv] Small, everyday, cylindrical karatsu, a Kyūshū ware of Korean origin (唐津焼).