speaking and writing, who has given himself over to silence. Kawabata
lived in Kamakura and had a studio in Zushi where he went to write. It was
in the Zushi studio that he killed himself in the spring of 1972. He left no
note. An obituary quoted him as having said, “A silent death is an endless
word.”
Kawabata probably had no intention of dying when he wrote “Silence”
in 1954, though it does seem likely that he foresaw the coming of a
different sort of silence, the silence of celebrity and the silence of sickness,
the silence of the writer who spends his time making it possible for others
to write. He foresaw its Corning because his own generosity was finally
responsible, because he himself took up the burden of silence. First Snow
on Fuji arises from silence.
One final note. “The Boat-Women: A Dance Drama” is one of only two
works for the stage that Kawabata created. The “verses” it contains are
neither “poems” nor “songs”—they are instead some combination of the
two. Each verse is marked with a vaguely mountain-like symbol, which
indicates that the line is to be intoned (or maybe chanted?) rather than
simply spoken. The verses are divided into blocks of five or seven syllables
in the Japanese, and they are written in an older form of the language; the
rest of the dance-drama is composed in fairly contemporary prose. The
battle fought between the enemy Genji and Heike clans at Dan-no-Ura in
1185, the history of which is told in The Tale the Heike, forms the
background of the piece. It is perhaps helpful to know that at this battle the
Genji triumphed over the more sophisticated and courtly Heike, and that
the story of Dan-no-Ura is one of the most moving and often-told stories in
Japanese literature.
So many people have helped make this book possible that I can hardly
begin to thank them all here.
Richard H. Okada, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Emmerich made any
number of valuable suggestions during the early stages of translation; Peter
