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. You see, a tea bowl retains nothing; it 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 and decorated with inky bracken shoots. It fits snugly into the diminutive palms of Mrs Ota—having earlier passed through

those of her husband (deceased), her lover Morita (deceased), and her onetime rival-in-love Chikako.[ii]  It is the last-named who had invited the Inamura girl, Yukiko, to participate in the tea ceremony, serving as well as お見合い (marriage prospect) for Kikuji, the son of Morita, the second-deceased. Thus we see a novel fills up: like a precious bowl, a woman is passed from hand to hand, from man to man, repeatedly sipped from. The bowl’s virtue is indisputable, intimating redemption. Yet there is lingering malignancy. Once, during a visit with his father to Chikako’s house, Kikuji watches her as she snips coarse black hairs from a purple palm-sized birthmark stretching from the left breast up onto the one on the right. Only eight or nine at the time, the boy gradually metamorphoses into the figure of his own father, as he imagines the older man squeezing Chikako’s clotted birthmark or nibbling at its edges with worn-out teeth—or else he pictures a half-brother or half-sister suckling there. Everything in life seeks ceremonial proportion. Chikako, needless to say, is barren: ‘You must hurry and marry Yukiko’, Kikuji is admonished.

2. cylindrical raku

As things transpire, Kikuji gets seduced by the other mistress, Mrs Ota: like father like son, there is ‘an extraordinary awakening’. Before her suicide (occurring shortly thereafter), the widow sheds a tear identical to the one her daughter must also shed later—because neither is ‘yet ready to return from the other world’. Also shared by the two

women are a ‘long neck and full shoulders’ and ‘pouting’ lower lip. Our next exhibit of bowls, a ‘man-wife’ cylindrical raku pair, one red one black, bears the 16th-century insignia of maker Ryōnyū, and indicates a ‘bond like a curse’.[iii] For Kawabata, the pageantry of the tea ceremony swallows those lives devoted to it. Fumiko, after spilling her tear on the tea kettle’s hot shoulder, staggers before her—and her mother’s—lover Kikuji, letting her long black hair drape onto the floor where it encircles the red raku. (A second mismatched pair of shino is also present: the first bowl serves as a ceremonial water jar, displaying Fumiko’s arrangement of ‘white roses and pale carnations’, ironically a memorial gift from Kukuji. The second, still in use as a tea bowl, bears a remnant of Mrs Ota’s smeared lipstick on its brim.) The figures of mother, daughter, and mistress coalesce, just as do those of Kikuji and his father. Inevitably, for Kikuji and Fumiko, ‘the pair of Raku bowls deepened the sorrow they had in common’. The confusion is arithmetical.

3. karatsu

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 pair karatsu, Korean in origin, cylindrical in shape, swelling towards the base: ‘undecorated, greenish with a touch of saffron and a touch too of carmine’.[iv] Placed alongside the second above-mentioned shino, with the

incriminating smear, the karatsu ‘were like the souls of his father and her mother’. ‘As if on a trip’, the children dissolve into a reenactment, bearing the mark of what they have lost. Like the raku, like all ritual, the karatsu displaces human sentiment. ‘There is much better shino’, Fumiko murmurs. And it is inside this better shino, the one bearing the ghoulish stain of her mother’s lips, that she whisks a final potion of tea for Kikuji and herself— and that she smashes into five pieces against the stone basin later that same night. You see, I speak of what is hard to name, almost beyond naming, and that is the insatiability of contrivance: ‘A faint red floated up from the white glaze’. All talk of marriage involving either Yukiko or Fumiko is a further contrivance spread by the ‘venomous’ Chikako, our tale’s decrepit lone survivor. Having journeyed long, a final reckoning beckons to all.

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).