Beauty and Sadness

Decades before the novel opens, the married novelist Oki had an affair with sixteen-year-old Otoko that ended in a premature, dying infant and Otoko's suicide attempt, then turned the whole episode into A Girl of Sixteen, the book that made his career. Kawabata builds the entire plot on the obscenity of that transaction: Oki got the finest book of his career out of a teenager's ruin, and returns to Kyoto years later, ostensibly to hear the year-end bells with Otoko, actually to reopen a wound he's never once considered might not still belong to him. Otoko, now a painter with a devoted younger companion, Keiko, receives him with a courtesy that reads, correctly, as armor rather than forgiveness.

Keiko is the novel's real engine. Having read Oki's novel and understood exactly what it cost the woman she loves, she sets out to avenge Otoko by seducing Oki's family from the inside, first drawing close to Oki himself and then to his grown son Taichiro, playing father and son against each other with a patience that never once tips into open confrontation. Kawabata gives Keiko's calculation the same still, glassy prose he gives everyone's desire, so that her revenge reads not as melodrama but as the last, coldest stage of an aesthetic that has run through the whole book: beauty as something wielded, precisely, to cause pain.

A Girl of Sixteen sits inside Beauty and Sadness as an accusation that none of the characters can stop discussing. Oki treats it as his finest work and shows no sign of recognizing it as an act of appropriation; Otoko has spent her adult life painting partly to build an identity the novel didn't already own; Keiko reads it as the plainest possible evidence of what Oki is. Kawabata, writing this late in his career, uses the buried novel to indict the very aestheticizing gaze his own fiction is often praised for, the gaze that turns a sixteen-year-old's ruin into something beautiful enough to win a man his reputation.