have disappeared,” he writes. “Or perhaps I ought to say that a different ‘I’
has been living inside me.’
This is when First Snow on Fuji was written. A time when Kawabata—
still at the very height of his powers—could count the minutes he called his
own. He had to make the most of each unclaimed moment, each precious
word. So it’s no surprise to find that the pieces in this collection are
incredibly distilled, often dealing with the relationship between language
and being, words and the past, and with being claimed, with losing
possession of one’s historical self. The book was published at a pivotal
moment, and we find traces in these stories of a great many of Kawabata’s
earlier writings. We find its author looking back, responding to his past,
even as he faces his future.
Readers familiar with Kawabata’s “Diary of My Sixteenth Year” may
feel as if they’ve come across the third story in this collection, “Nature,”
before. Kawabata had lost both his parents by the time he was three, his
grandmother and his younger sister by the time he was ten. He lived alone
with his blind, eventually bedridden grandfather until the old man passed
away, and the life Kawabata lived as he waited for that death—feeding his
grandfather, helping him urinate, running from the house filled with anger
and running back full of sadness—this life is the principal subject of “Diary
of My Sixteenth Year.” Perhaps “Nature” could be read as a much older
Kawabata’s postwar revision of that extremely early work, a fresh attempt
to lay an old ghost to rest. Only the story’s structure is more complex, the
dying man is now someone else’s grandfather, and the narrator knows
nothing but what he’s been told.
Kawabata wrote in his 1950 afterword to “Diary of My Sixteenth Year”
that what most intrigued him as he looked back over the piece was “the
mystery of my being unable to recall these things, even though I once
experienced them.” This mystery is deeply embedded in “Nature.”
