thousand cranes & fruition

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

               dramatis personae
               Mrs Ota – widow, mother to Yukiko, mistress to Morita and Kikuji
               Chikako – mistress to Morita, tea ceremony hostess
               Yukiko – daughter to Mrs Ota
               Kikuji – son to Morita

Oribe[ii]                           

The Inamura girl carries a wrapping cloth of a thousand cranes that contains tea utensils. A friend accompanies her. Another remains unspoken. You see, ultimately a tea bowl retains nothing; it only signals persistence. Life, too, swilled and emptied, perishes and repeats. The first bowl is Oribe, glazed in black with splashes of white embellished with inky bracken

shoots. It fits snugly into the widow Ota’s diminutive palms, having earlier passed through those of her husband (deceased), her lover (deceased), and her onetime rival-in-love, Chikako—who has invited the youthful Yukiko with the thousand cranes to participate and simultaneously serve as an omiai (お見合い) for Kikuji, son of the second-named deceased. Thus a novel fills and empties. Like a precious bowl, a woman is passed from hand to hand, from man to man. The virtue of the bowl is beyond question, a token of redemption. Yet there is malignancy in Chikako. Kikuji, when accompanying his father, had watched her snip whiskery black hairs from a purple birthmark, the size of a palm, that spreads from her left breast across a small valley between them up onto the breast on the right. Eight or nine at the time, he will gradually metamorphose into the same man, imagining his father squeezing at his mistress’s clotted birthmark or biting it with his old teeth—or else with dread he pictures a half-brother or sister obliged to suckle there. Chikako, needless to say, is barren: ‘You must hurry and marry Yukiko’, she admonishes Kikuji.

Cylindrical Raku[iii]

All things transpire. Mrs Ota seduces Kikuji, like father like son, ‘an extraordinary awakening’. Prior to her suicide, which occurs shortly thereafter, the doppelganger mistress sheds a tear identical to that which her daughter Fumiko will also shed later in the novel, because neither’s ‘yet ready to return from the other world’. Shared as

well is their alluring ‘long neck and full shoulders’, pouting lower lips. The pageantry of the tea ceremony swallows the procession of lives dedicated to it. A ‘man-wife’ pair of cylindrical Raku bowls, one red one black, bearing the insignia of 16th century potter Ryōnyū, echoes the familial ‘bond like a curse’. Shortly after dropping her tear on the tea kettle’s hot shoulder, Fumiko staggers, her long black hair draping onto the floor and encircling the red Raku. Unlike the mismatching Shino ‘pair’, the first a ceremonial water jar gifted by Kikuji and rendered by Fumiko in an arrangement with ‘white roses and pale carnations’ in memory of her mother; the second, still in use, supposedly bearing a remnant of the same woman’s smeared lipstick on its brim—Raku cares more for the commonplace of intimacy: ‘The pair of Raku bowls deepened the sorrow they had in common’.

Karatsu[iv] / recursive Shino / hermaphrodite

For the widow, the lover is the lover’s father; for the lover, the mother’s daughter is the mother. The third bowl is Karatsu, an interloper, Korean in origin, cylindrical in shape: ‘undecorated, greenish with a touch of saffron and a touch too of carmine’, swelling towards the base. Placed alongside the Shino with the tarnished rim, ‘the two

bowls before them were like the souls of his father and her mother’. ‘As if on a trip’, the children resolve into a single composite, bearing both marks, as if reenactment ensures expiation. Like the Raku, like all things, the Karatsu is a displacement. ‘There is much better Shino’, Fumiko murmurs. And it is this ‘better’ Shino, bearing the brownish smear, in which she endeavours to whisk a final shared potion for her and Kikuji, that, during the same night, Fumiko forlornly smashes into five pieces against the stone basin. Here I have spoken of what I have not named, and what is perhaps 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 falsehood spread by the ‘venomous’ Chikako, our lone-survivor. Having travelled long, we are obliged to repetition.

Moralitas

As he looked at the masterpiece it was, he felt all the more strongly the masterpiece Mrs Ota had been. 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 Mitano, is in turn gifted to Chikako.

[iii] Kyoto ware, first produced in the 16th century. Ryōnyū (1756-1834) was the ninth master of the Raku kiln (楽焼). Its 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).

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