Beauty and Sadness

The New Year’s Bell

On New Year’s Eve, the novelist Oki Toshio boards a train for Kyoto to hear the temple bells ring in the new year. He has a secondary purpose: Otoko, the woman he loved when she was seventeen and he was married and she was pregnant with his child, lives in Kyoto now as a celebrated painter. He has not seen her in twenty-four years. He wants to see her again—not clearly knowing why, not examining the impulse with any of the honesty a novelist might be expected to bring to his own motivations.

Otoko does not meet him. She sends Keiko instead—her young student, her companion in ways the novel leaves deliberately ambiguous. The encounter is brief, charged, and inconclusive. Oki returns to Tokyo. The novel has begun.

What Kawabata establishes in the novel’s opening movement is the precise nature of Oki’s offense against Otoko. He had an affair with her when she was a teenager. She became pregnant. The child died. He remained with his wife. And then—this is the wound that the novel circles—he wrote a novel using her, using her pregnancy, using the dead child, as his material. The novel was celebrated. Otoko was not consulted. Her grief became his art.

Keiko’s Revenge

Keiko is twenty years old, a painter of extraordinary talent, and in love with Otoko with a devotion that includes protective fury. She has lived with the knowledge of what Oki did—not just the affair and the abandonment, but the theft of Otoko’s story—and she has decided, with the precision of an artist, what to do about it.

What follows is a sequence of seductions and manipulations conducted through beauty: Keiko is beautiful, uses her beauty deliberately, and directs it first at Oki himself and then at Oki’s son Taichiro, who falls genuinely in love with her. The revenge she enacts is not hot-blooded but cold, patient, and aesthetically conceived—she is, after all, a painter. She makes of the situation something with its own form.

Kawabata refuses to make this simple. Keiko’s love for Otoko is real. Her resentment of Oki is justified. Her manipulation of Taichiro causes genuine harm to someone who has done nothing wrong. The novel holds all of this without resolving it into a moral judgment, which is both its achievement and, for some readers, its difficulty. The ending arrives with the quality of inevitability that tragedy requires—and leaves the question of who has won anything entirely open.

Art as Wound

The ethical question at the center of Beauty and Sadness is the one that fiction writing makes unavoidable and that most fiction about fiction prefers to avoid: what do you owe the people whose lives you transform into your material?

Oki’s celebrated novel used Otoko’s abortion, her grief, her youth. He did not ask her permission. He gave her a different name, changed the details enough for deniability, and produced a work that many readers consider his best. The fact that the novel is beautiful does not, in Kawabata’s accounting, absolve the act. The beauty is the wound.

Otoko has responded by making their story into paintings—her own transformation of the shared material, her own act of aesthetic claim. The difference is that her paintings are abstract, do not name him, cannot be read by his wife or children. His novel named her, effectively if not literally, and changed her life in ways she did not choose.

This makes Beauty and Sadness Kawabata’s most explicitly ethical novel, which is also its most surprising quality. The serene, aestheticizing sensibility of Snow Country and The Old Capital is here applied to a situation where the aesthetics themselves are implicated in the harm. Beauty, the novel argues, is not innocent. Sadness, it follows, may be its necessary cost.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Kawabata’s darkest and most ethically searching novel: a story of obsession, revenge, and the violence that art can carry, rendered with his characteristic precision and without his characteristic serenity.