The eroticism and the writing

PAIS OF SNOW
By Yasunari Kawabata-(Emecé)-Trad.: Juan Forn-158 pages-($ 20)
FIRST SNOW IN ELMONTE FUJI
By Yasunari Kawabata-(Norma)-Trad.: J. Parra-237 barrier pages-($ 27)
CORRESPONDENCE (1945-1970)
By Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima-(Emecé)-Trad.: Liliana Ponce-252 pages-($ 25)

Mr. Shimamura, protagonist of snow Country , has a species of hobby: he collects all material that finds on the western ballet. Guard photos and articles, translates texts on dance, is to as much of the last new features. Nevertheless, never he has seen a work of western ballet. Its pleasure consists of imagining what names, descriptions and photographies suggest to him. Shimamura fears that, if gets to see a western work, the enchantment disappears completely.

Hobby of Shimamura is a small emblem of the narrative world of Kawabata, today presents/displays in our bookstores through three works: a novel ( snow Country ), a book of stories ( First snow in the Fuji mount ) and a volume of correspondence (with Yukio Mishima). Like Mr. Shimamura, their personages often live surrounded in ensoñaciones. The eroticism and the writing are the two faces of this dream: both ways that their personages choose to leave tracks in the others and that are also ways to erase.

The writing - and the destruction of the writing often infiltrates in the narrations of Kawabata. In snow Country , a married man middle-aged knows, in a small mountain town, where there are thermal waters, to Komako, a young person geisha. He is fascinated with the newspaper that she writes; she enjoys with the idea to burn the pages before dying. In the story "Without words", a old writer undergoes a brain-vascular attack and is dumb and crippled to move the right hand; her daughter arranges itself to continue the work of her father, according to a purely imaginary interpretation. Its act repeats, simultaneously, the argument of one of books of the patient. Another one of the stories, "crisantemo on the rock", is in fact a delicate study of stones and funeral constructions that there are in the Japanese cemeteries. The narrator chooses for his tomb a stone that will not take to its name nor date some, and thinks with affability about that naked stone, that will finish being confused with others, until it is not left any track of his passage by the world. There is no a page where the idea of death and the one of writing do not go together, and where the emptiness of the page is not confused with the spectral target of the snow.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. No familiar misfortune was denied to him: before the three years, it lost to his father and his mother; to the seven to its grandmother (who raised it) and to her sister three years later. Of all his family his grandfathers only survived, blind person, who died in 1914. The figure of its grandfathers will appear in its first story, Newspaper of my sixteenth anniversary. The solitude and the relation with the patients and deads will be repeated frequently in their work, one of most popular in Japan.

Kawabata occupied a central place in the renovation of the Japanese letters. Snow country , published in 1937, served to him to consolidate its place of writer. It had one long activity within the Pen club of Japan, and traveled like delegate to many congresses, which is reflected in the correspondence with Mishima. It gained the Nobel prize in 1968.

The volume of correspondence includes 25 years (1945-1970). When they began to correspond itself, Mishima was a timid writer of twenty years who not yet had adopted his famous pseudonym. It signed his texts with his true name: Kimitake Hiraoka. Kawabata, however, was a recognized writer. In the beginning of the correspondence, of the side of Mishima they are the insistence and the veneration; of the side of Kawabata, the courtesy and perhaps the resignation.

But with running of the years, both writers deepened their friendship and to Kawabata a sincere admiration by the work of Mishima notices to him. This it so arrived to be known in the West that his teacher requested that outside he who wrote the recommendation for Nobel. But the prize - that took years in arriving put both to writers in certain situation of competition that is not reflected in its letters. To Mishima they had convinced it that he was a firm candidate to Nobel, thus, if it were called on to him to make a trip in dates near the proclamation of the winner, took the precaution to take a formal dress in the valise. When Kawabata was chosen, Mishima knew that already never it would win: he knew that the Swedish committee would take at least ten years in choosing another Japanese writer, and it would not arrive alive at that date. In spite of its disappointment, as soon as it found out the prize wrote a message of congratulation to his teacher, in which the intact veneration of the beginnings notices.

The letters, although allow to infer opinions and some ironies, rely on extreme rules of courtesy. The writers never give in absolutely the confidence. The attitude of Kawabata remains identical to itself throughout the quarter of century; Mishima however, leaves appears some spying of its explosive character. In spite of that, hardly it can be connected to this calmed correspondent with the man who was made photograph naked and crossed by arrows like San Sebastián, or run over by the wheels of a truck; either with the nationalist raised who armed his own army, neither with which it chose the spectacular suicide the more, not only of the Japanese letters but of world-wide Literature.

Sometimes the humor of Mishima overcomes the courtesy rules and some irony is allowed: "To intention, today I was with Sen-no- S™kyo and as it only spoke of how it teaches on the tea when it travels to the West, I did not have scruples in saying to him: Instead of traveling to so calm and calm countries, what seems to you if you went to towns in war, like Vietnam of the South, and practiced the ceremony of the tea when the bullets whistle to you in the ears? °Esa is a true one via of you ' "

Mishima committed suicide according to the Japanese ritual in 1970, when it was forty and five years old, after taking prisoner to a commander of the army and haranguing from a balcony the reunited troops. One of its disciples accompanied it in the death; other two were arrested. Kawabata suicidió in 1972, but of a way much more rested: it ignited the gas key of his house of summering. Diane de Margerie writes in the remarkable prologue to the correspondence: "the blood, the luminosity and the hero - so it was the universe of Mishima -; the spectral whiteness, the mortuary purity, the time of orphanhood - so he was the one of Kawabata". But in spite of the differences between both, the critic suggests a secret bow: "he is not risky to think that, modest and content, Kawabata secretly found in Mishima to a double that arrived at the limit and that it did not avoid, sometimes, to reveal it to it".

Shortly after the death of Mishima, John Nathan (friend and translator of its texts) wrote his biography. In the introduction, Nathan gives account of the difficulties to speak as much with the wife of Mishima like with the parents of the writer. Nathan knew that the most important woman in her life had been Shizue, his mother (to whom Mishima took each page that wrote so that it read it before publishing it, custom that it respected until the end of his life). Pero Shizue refused to speak with him. The father, however, accepted, but what had to say nonera more than a hollow exaltación of itself. "When it went from visit to the house of the parents, Shizue did not appear. It was there, in the quarter of alongside, listening to my conversation with his husband, and correcting to him once in a while through the sliding doors of paper, with commentaries as these ` you gave fear Him, for that reason lloraba´, or ` How you are going to know it, if you were never alli '; you never were close when you necesitaba´. In an American house, I would have saluted to Shizue through the paper doors and she would have asked to him if she could come to be awhile with us. But that in Tokyo was unimaginable."

As it happens to him to Nathan, the reader of this correspondence attends an interchange of words that, suspects, do not say all the truth. But when reading between lines, and when taking care of the notes that complete the volume, he perhaps gets himself to listen to the voice that corrects the narrated thing and full the hollows. The voice that comes across - like the one from the mother of the paper.

The three volumes count on very well-taken care of translations. The writer Juan Forn translated snow Country of the English edition; the poet Liliana Ponce worked in the French edition of the correspondence. Jaime Parra Barrier faced the Japanese text of First snow in the Fuji mount directly , that accompanied, for joy of the reader, with a complete glossary.