Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People Read Free

Asakusa Kurenaidan? he asked.
    - I never learned to read.
    - Well, at least you learned to speak. We can talk, finally.
    And he smiled, his white head birdlike against the light of the slow canal and the distant clamor of Tokyo traffic.
    But we did not continue the conversation. People were now pushing, wanting to have a word with the famous novelist. We had already had our talk. And whenever we met thereafter, Kawabata would cock his head on one side and look at me quizzically, humorously, as though we had something in common.
    Ten years later, the translation of House of the Sleeping Beauties appeared and I saw that Kawabata had been as true to his vision of Asakusa as I had been to mine. Yumiko, or her daughter, was now in this strange house in Kamakura where old men found their youth again in sleeping girls, in firm, dormant flesh.
    And, later still, one day in 1972, a quarter of a century after we had stood on the tower and thought of Yumiko, I saw his face flash onto the television screen. Noted author dead, a suicide.
    I could not believe it. Dead, yes, but not a suicide. How could anyone who so loved life, and sex, and Asakusa, kill himself? No, it was an accident. The body had been found in the bathroom, the water running. He had been going to take a bath. He had used the gas hose as a support, pulled it loose, was overcome. This I wanted to believe. I could hear the water running, and I remembered the silver of the Sumida, the muddy bronze of the Sukiyabashi Canal.
    But in time I too came to believe that his was a suicide. The kiss of death—not arsenic but gas—had been chosen. Naked, Kawabata had stepped into the water just as Yumiko had slipped into the boat and got away.

Shozo Kuroda
    Old Mr. Kuroda—Shozo his nicely old-fashioned given name, a neighbor—blinks. Old men blink like babies, as though not yet used to their eyes. His eyes widen, contract, then blink, each sight as though astonishing. He stares at me, stunned.
    I stare back. Old people are faintly disreputable. We may feel sorry for them but at the same time we condemn, as if being this old, lasting this long, were somehow a social fault, a breach of etiquette.
    His daughter sighs and wipes his chin, as she would that of a small child. And what is it now? she asks, turning, hearing his yammering: Oh, I see. That's nice. Then she looks away. She is speaking to him as he must have spoken to her when she was very young.
    Later, while he is lying down, taking his childlike afternoon nap, she says that he has no darashi. Strong words: darashi ga nai. I know perfectly well what it means, but am not sure what it specifies.
    Let me look it up in the dictionary. There. Slovenly, untidy, sloppy, disheveled, unkempt, slipshod, etc.—a list of attributes ending with, oddly: a loose fish. What could that be? One always learns something about one's own language from the Japanese-English dictionary.
    And we have no comparable phrase in the West, where sloppiness is considered less of a sin and can even be seen as attractive, a sign, in young people, of naturalness, spontaneity, freedom from conservative restraint.
    No virtue here, however, even—or particularly—among the young. No, certainly not attractive, here where everyone must pull his own weight, where nothing too different is tolerated for too long, where appearances are so much more important than truths.
    Strong words, but she smiled as she said them, as one might when speaking of a child, someone you understand, forgive, love. And—she continued—he wet his bed the other night again. Talk about darashi ga nai koto. And who had to get up and change the bedding so that he wouldn't be lying in it the whole night long? Another sigh—a fat forty, hopes blasted.
    A situation reminiscent of an Ozu film— Late Spring, perhaps. But there the daughter still has her life before her. And there he is still a fine figure of a man. Ozu, being an artist, knew where to