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Yasunari Kawabata (author), Haydn Trowell (translator), The Rainbow, Penguin, 2023. 400 pgs.
Yasunari Kawabata's The Rainbow, recently translated into English for the first time,evokes in me a strong feeling of humidity. A loved one told me that he has the ability to smell summer in the air, its presence to him as certain as sweat on skin. The Rainbow occupies that sort of humid melancholic world. Though it had been a while since I'd read anything by Kawabata, it wasn't long before his distinctive humidity felt familiar again. The novel's focus on passing seasons; its close-ups of characters' necks and ears; and even their conversations, laden with unsaid meaning, all bring to mind an oppressive humidity, the sort that leaves wet traces on walls.
The main characters in The Rainbow are a pair of sisters, Momoko and Asako, who come of age in post-war Japan. Their days are listless and languid, and their family's wealth largely protects them from the material shortages of war. But the war nonetheless leaves vicious undercurrents in their young lives, which are already troubled by the betrayals of their father, Mizuhara, an aged architect. His indiscreet love affairs mean that the sisters are born to different mothers, and they have an additional, estranged younger sister in Tokyo's demi-monde. Ashamed of her birth, Momoko has one instable romance after another, while Asako represses her anxieties with self-effacing obedience. During the one-year time span of the novel, the sisters struggle to make sense of the changing world around them while trying to mend their own pasts.
Kawabata excels in scenes that start off ordinary but escalate until the tension can be cut with a knife. Though the novel never portrays war upfront, instead focusing on genteel episodes of daily life—baths, garden walks, long, purposeless seaside holidays—we still see the impact of war in the characters' dark impulses, and it is in their constant tug and pull between passivity and destruction that the tension of the novel reaches its peak.
The Rainbow also hints at violence through its anxious attention to the body. Characters are often shown fixing their hair and adjusting their clothing; and as mutual observers, they focus uneasily on each other's lips, teeth, and necks. In an unsettling scene, Momoko contemplates a silver bowl cast from her breast. It was made, with possessive greed, by her former lover Keita, who then jilts her and dies at war soon after. At times Kawabata's sexualised descriptions of his female characters are discomfiting. I find myself thinking: surely describing a nipple here is unnecessary, even self-indulgent. It is in Kawabata's restrained descriptions of emotional suffering that he is most effective.
The sisters, paying the debt for their father's misdeeds, can easily be read as stand-ins for a younger generation forced to contend with the fallout of war. Still, a tentative optimism stretches throughout the work. Melancholic interactions are punctuated by brief but gorgeous descriptions of nature: flowers, hills, rivers, and of course, the titular rainbow. I mentioned humidity earlier, focusing on the discomfort it brings, but a gardener would add that it also germinates life. Though the novel shows us squalor and rubble, Kawabata's vibrant natural imagery also promises us that life has a way of carrying on.
How to cite: Tse, Gabrielle. "Carrying On: Yasunari Kawabata's The Rainbow." Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/02/the-rainbow.
Gabrielle Tse is a Hong Kong-born, Edinburgh-based writer of poetry and short fiction, currently studying Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her writings can be found in The Hong Kong Review, Interpret Magazine, Outcrop Poetry, and elsewhere.
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