Thousand Cranes

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned at the age of two. His first stories were published while he was still in high school and he decided to become a writer. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year later made his first impact on Japanese letters with ‘Izu Dancer’. He soon became a leading figure of the lyrical school that offered the chief challenge to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s.
Snow Country
(1956) and
Thousand Cranes
(1959) brought him international recognition and he was the recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. Kawabata died by his own hand on 16 April 1972.

Thousand Cranes
is translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (1921–2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese literature.

Thousand Cranes

YASUNARI KAWABATA

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published 1958

Published in Penguin Classics 2011

Copyright © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1958

Copyright © renewed Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1986

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-95022-8

Contents

Thousand Cranes

The Grove in the Evening Sun

Figured Shino

Her Mother’s Lipstick

Double Star

Note on the pronunciation of Japanese names

Consonants are pronounced approximately as in English, except that ‘g’ is always hard, as in Gilbert. Vowels are pronounced as in Italian. Also as in Italian, the final g is always sounded. Thus the name Kaname is pronounced Kah-nah-meh. There is no heavy penultimate accent as in English; it is adequate to accent each syllable equally.

The Japanese name order has been followed throughout this translation, with the family name first.

Thousand Cranes

1

Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony. He was already late.

He received an announcement whenever Kurimoto Chikako offered tea at the inner cottage of the Engakuji. He had not once gone since his father’s death, however. He thought of the announcements as no more than formal gestures in memory of his father.

This time there had been a postscript: she wanted him to meet a young lady to whom she was giving tea lessons.

As he read it, Kikuji thought of Chikako’s birthmark.

Had he been eight, perhaps, or nine? He had been taken by his father to visit Chikako, and they had found her in the breakfast room. Her kimono was open. She was cutting the hair on her birthmark with a small pair of scissors. It covered half the left breast and ran down into the hollow between the breasts, as large as the palm of one’s hand. Hair seemed to be growing on the purple-black mark, and Chikako was in process of cutting it.

‘You brought the boy with you?’

In surprise, she snatched at the neck of her kimono. Then, perhaps because haste only complicated her efforts to cover herself, she turned slightly away and carefully tucked kimono into obi.

The surprise must have been less at Kikuji’s father than at Kikuji. Since a maid had met them at the door, Chikako must have known at least that Kikuji’s father had come.

Kikuji’s father did not go into the breakfast room. He sat down in the next room instead, the room where Chikako gave lessons.

‘Do you suppose I could have a cup of tea?’ Kikuji’s father asked absently. He looked up at the hanging in the alcove.

‘Yes.’ But Chikako did not move.

On the newspaper at her knee, Kikuji had seen hairs like whiskers.

Though it was broad daylight, rats were scurrying about in the hollow ceiling. A peach tree was in bloom near the veranda.

When at length she took her place by the tea hearth, Chikako seemed preoccupied.

Some ten days later, Kikuji heard his mother telling his father, as if it were an extraordinary secret of which he could not have known, that Chikako was unmarried because of the birthmark. There was compassion in her eyes.

‘Oh?’ Kikuji’s father nodded in apparent surprise. ‘But it wouldn’t matter, would it, if her husband were to see it? Especially if he knew of it before he married her?’

‘That’s exactly what I said to her. But after all a woman is a woman. I don’t think I would ever be able to tell a man that I had a big mark on my breast.’

‘But she’s hardly young any more.’

‘Still it wouldn’t be easy. A man with a birthmark could probably get married and just laugh when he was found out.’

‘Did you see the mark?’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course not.’

‘You just talked about it?’

‘She came for my lesson, and we talked about all sorts of things. I suppose she felt like confessing.’

Kikuji’s father was silent.

‘Suppose she were to marry. What would the man think?’

‘He’d probably be disgusted by it. But he might find something attractive in it, in having it for a secret. And then again the defect might bring out good points. Anyway, it’s hardly a problem worth worrying about.’

‘I told her it was no problem at all. But it’s on the breast, she says.’

‘Oh?’

‘The hardest thing would be having a child to nurse. The husband might be all right, but the child.’

‘The birthmark would keep milk from coming?’

‘Not that. No, the trouble would be having the child look at the birthmark while it was nursing. I hadn’t seen quite so far myself, but a person who actually has a birthmark thinks of these things. From the day it was born it would drink there; and from the day it began to see, it would see that ugly mark on its mother’s breast. Its first impression of the world, its first impression of its mother, would be that ugly birthmark, and there the impression would be, through the child’s whole life.’

‘Oh? But isn’t that inventing worries?’

‘You could nurse it on cow’s milk, I suppose, or hire a wet nurse.’

‘I should think the important thing would be whether or not there was milk, not whether or not there was a birthmark.’

‘I’m afraid not. I actually wept when I heard. So that’s how it is, I thought. I wouldn’t want our Kikuji nursing at a breast with a birthmark on it.’

‘Oh?’

At this show of ingenuousness, a wave of indignation came over Kikuji, and a wave of resentment at his father, who could ignore him even though he too had seen the mark.

Now, however, almost twenty years later, Kikuji was able to smile at the thought of his father’s confusion.

From the time he was ten or so, he often thought of his mother’s words and started with uneasiness at the idea of a half-brother or half-sister sucking at the birthmark.

It was not just fear of having a brother or sister born away from home, a stranger to him. It was rather fear of that brother or sister in particular. Kikuji was obsessed with the idea that a child who sucked at that breast, with its birthmark and its hair, must be a monster.

Chikako appeared to have had no children. One could, if one wished, suspect that his father had not allowed her to. The association of birthmark and baby that had saddened his mother might have been his father’s device for convincing Chikako that she did not want children. In any case, Chikako produced none, either while Kikuji’s father lived or after his death.

Perhaps Chikako had made her confession so soon after Kikuji had seen the birthmark because she feared that Kikuji himself would tell of it.

Chikako did not marry. Had the birthmark then governed her whole life?

Kikuji never forgot the mark. He could sometimes imagine even that his own destinies were enmeshed in it.

When he received the note saying that Chikako meant to make the tea ceremony her excuse for introducing him to a young lady, the birthmark once more floated before him; and, since the introduction would be made by Chikako, he wondered if the young lady herself would have a perfect skin, a skin unmarred by so much as a dot.

Had his father occasionally squeezed the birthmark between his fingers? Had he even bitten at it? Such were Kikuji’s fantasies.

Even now, as he walked through the temple grounds and heard the chirping of birds, those were the fantasies that came to him.

Some two or three years after the incident, Chikako had somehow turned masculine in manner. Now she was quite sexless.

At the ceremony today she would be bustling about energetically. Perhaps that breast with its birthmark would have withered. Kikuji felt a smile of relief come to his lips; and just then two young women hurried up behind him.

He stopped to let them pass.

‘Do you know whether the cottage Miss Kurimoto has taken might be in this direction?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it is,’ the two answered in unison.

Kikuji already knew, and he could have told from their dress that they were on their way to a tea ceremony. He had asked because he had to make it clear to himself that he was going.

One of the girls was beautiful. She carried a bundle wrapped in a kerchief, the thousand-crane pattern in white on a pink crepe background.

2

The two girls were changing to fresh
tabi
¹
when Kikuji arrived.

He looked in from behind them. The main room was a large one, some eight mats in area.
²

Even so, the guests presented a solid row of knees. There seemed to be only women, women in bright kimonos.

Chikako saw him immediately. As if in surprise, she stood up to greet him.

‘Come in, come in. What a prize! Please, it will be quite all right to come in from there.’ She pointed to the sliding door at the upper end of the room, before the alcove.

Kikuji flushed. He felt the eyes of all those women.

‘Ladies only, is it?’