One Japanese critic suggests that Kawabata wrote “Yumiura” as a sequel
to another very early work, “The Izu Dancer.” He believes that the woman
who shows up at the aging author’s door in “Yumiura” is the earlier story’s
childish dancer, now grown into a woman. “The Izu Dancer’ is thought to
be a section spun from real events; perhaps “Yumiura” has a sort of
camouflaged truth in it too? Is it a particularly personal work? Some
readers will be hesitant to accept such speculations, but of course
speculation has its pleasures. Kawabata included both “The Izu Dancer”
and “Yumiura” (along with “Chrysanthemum in the Rock”) in a collection
of his own favorites from among his works that was published not long
before he received the Nobel Prize. The book includes so few short stories
that it seems reasonable to assume—this if nothing else—that Kawabata
was exceptionally fond of the stories, that “Yumiura” and “The Izu Dancer”
were indeed linked in one way or another within the realm of their author’s
affections, perhaps even in the manner suggested.
Much more could be said about the stories in this book and their ties to
Kawabata’s other writings, to his biography, and about the lines that string
the stories together, since their sequence is not chronological. It is my hope
that this first translation will prompt readers and critics to begin that saying.
As for myself, I'm unable to conclude without at least mentioning the story
that first took hold of me and made it necessary for me to translate First
Snow on Fuji. My first reading of “Silence” left me dumbstruck. Such an
intense expression of Kawabata’s aesthetics and thinking . . . of the
“nothing” he discusses . . . of so much that lies at the heart of postwar
masterpieces like The Master of Go ... of the meaning fallen chestnut that
Shingo chooses not to mention to his wife in The Sound the Mountain and
the everlasting presence in their marriage of the “blank” his silence leaves.
“Silence” was a Central work in Kawabata’s oeuvre. As I read it again it
occurred to me that it was also eerily prophetic. In the story a young writer
takes a cab from Kamakura, where he lives, to the neighboring town of
Zushi. There he visits another writer, an older man who has stopped
