Resisting Temptation: Kawabata’s Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Namichidori (Plovers above Waves)
Resisting Temptation: Kawabata’s Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes) and Namichidori (Plovers above Waves)

Summary/Abstract: In an attempt to clarify and sort out some things seemingly left unfinished in his novel Senbazuru 千羽鶴, Thousand Cranes, published in volume in 1952 (Shōwa 27), Kawabata Yasunari wrote in 19531954 (Shōwa 28-29) several fragments featuring again Mitani Kikuji, the two young ladies (Inamura Yukiko and Ota Fumiko) in whom he shows a strong (though very different) interest, as well as the malicious and interfering Kurimoto Chikako, all of them repositioned within a relationship system inspired by another traditional Japanese bird-design, known as the plover, or chidori 千鳥 (literally “a thousand birds”), presented in a special configuration, namichidori 波千鳥, “plovers above waves”. After elaborating on his characters’ acts and feelings, the author eventually lost motivation – or resisted the temptation – to continue the endeavor and abandoned it, citing the loss (or theft) of his notebook with meticulous sketches. In the following 18 years of his life, he never revisited this particular project, preferring to write other books, among which Utsukushisa to kanashimi to 美しさと哀しみと, Beauty and Sadness [too] (1964/Shōwa 39), where he revealed his thoughts on a specific theme that four years later he approached again, from another angle, in his Nobel Prize conference, Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. Finding beauty in sadness, evanescence, renunciation, and incompleteness – fully embracing the wabi-sabi 侘び寂び aesthetics – might well explain the mystery of a certain notebook that supposedly went missing forever.

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