In the novel Thousand Cranes Yasunari Kawabata portrays destiny and sexual desire, apathy and human fate through the character of Kikuji. Kikuji, the hero of Thousand Cranes, is an obscure character, an indecisive, cynical young man. Although he is disgusted with his late, wealthy father who loved women and art, he is perceptive enough to see the despair, born of attachment to life, behind his father’s endless involvement in sexual affairs. Kawabata uses unique symbols and themes such as tea ceremony and a symbol of the house, birth mark on Chikako’s breast and minor characters of mistresses. These stylistic devices help Kawabat to shape the atmosphere and create unique images of characters and portray their inner self. Yasunari Kawabata uses symbolic imagery in Thousand Cranes to create a story conflict, appeal to readers emotions and imagination through vivid description of the deeds and pitfalls of the main character, Kikuji.
Kawabata uses a lot of symbols and motifs to portray life and destiny of the main character. From the very beginning, he unveils that Kikuji uses his sexual attraction and knows well that this same desperation can make women demoniac, as is the case with Chikako, one of his father’s mistresses, and that it is what drove his father to the serene world of tea and the eternal beauty of tea utensils. Kikuji’s destiny is to have inherited this desperation of his father, together with his house and his mistresses (Carriere 52). “People with big houses all seem to be saying that. The young lady yesterday was very surprised at the size of this house” (Kawabata 49). To some extent, the house and father’s mistresses symbolizes past and death Kikuji cannot forget and overcome. The curse of the house left for Kikuji after his father’s death symbolizes his fate. Kikuji’s house retains his father’s tireless desire for life and his lustful obsession with sexual pleasure, as well as his despairing longing for spiritual consolation and the purgation of his desire in eternal beauty. A symbol of the house is interpreted as his mother’s quiet resentment, resignation and despair, all reflecting her waning life-energy (Moore 145). Also, it can be seen as Chikako’s demonic jealousy, reflecting her crude attachment to life. In other words, the house contains hatred, unsublimated frustration (desire and jealousy) and the unfulfilled longing for spiritual salvation. The house contains the curse of human life. The birthmark of Chikako which Kikuji glimpsed in his infancy is at once a symbol of the ugliness of the body and of human desire, of demoniac frustration and of man’s obsession with life (Carriere 52).
The ugly mark on Chikako’s breast is another symbol of death and destiny. It symbolizes her lack of essential femininity, her lack of sexuality as well as of maternal tenderness. Kikuji is a child symbolically fed by the breast with the ugly mark. Chikako’s lack of sexual desire and sensuality convert her into a spirit of revenge obsessed with power, and thus she becomes a poison which drains man’s erotic life-force and spontaneous desire for life. “A child who sucked at that breast, with its birthmark and its hair, must be a monster. Chikako appeared to have had no children” (Kawabata 6). The mark’s ugliness is that of man’s obsessive love of life itself. After his father’s death, Kikuji gradually comes to realize that he is the legitimate heir of the curse of the house. “He thought of the birthmark that covered half her breast. The sound of her broom became the sound of a broom sweeping the contents from his skull” (Kawabata 43). Chikako starts controlling him, and through her he is drawn into the world of tea, away from which he had consciously kept himself (Moore 145).
Tea ceremony is portrayed as a symbol of destiny and renewal. Kawabata portrays that at Chikako’s tea ceremony he meets Mrs. Ota, one of his father’s former mistresses, and he starts having an affair with her. Before long he becomes almost identical to his father — Mrs. Ota often mistakes him for his father — and he is drawn into the ambivalence which lies between the sensuous world of women and the eternal serenity of tea (Carriere 52). Although Chikako’s greedy attachment to life and the purifying serenity of tea are contradictory to each other, Chikako and tea are inseparable. Because Chikako’s birthmark makes those who perceive it aware of the grotesqueness of life, they are drawn to the world of tea. At the tea ceremony, Kikuji is introduced to a young girl named Inamura, whom he is to consider as his potential bride. Her unstained beauty, innocence and cleanness evoke his longing for something which is lacking in his life; he is reminded of his alienation from feminine tenderness (Sister Mary Jo Moran 75). She makes him aware of his present corruption, the ugliness of Chikako and the frustration of his father.
And yet he felt that he was wrapped in a dark, dirty, suffocating curtain….
The dirtiness was not only in Chikako, who had introduced them [Kikuji and the Inamura girl]. It was in Kikuji too (Kawabata 54).
The Inamura girl is, like Yōko, the ultimate of purity, and Kikuji is separated from her by an absolute distance. From the time of Chikako’s tea ceremony, Kikuji is no longer a cynical observer, but is trapped in the duality of his aspiration. Through Mrs. Ota, he comes to know the deeply satisfying tenderness of a woman, that of the eternal Mother. Yet her femininity has been distorted by the poison of Kikuji’s father and Chikako; her feeling of guilt drains her vital life-energy, making her a melancholic woman (Carriere 52). She is a dream-mother who, tired in this world, wanders like a ghost. Mrs. Ota’s vitality is drained by the obsessive desire for life, jealousy and vengeful spirit of others; Mrs. Ota fades away as the morning glory fades in the daytime. Chikako, Mrs. Ota and tea all symbolize the world of Kikuji’s father. His involvement in tea and tea utensils as artwork was antithetical to his attachment to life.
Beautiful, said Kikuji, as if to himself. It wasn’t Father’s nature to play with tea bowls, and yet he did, and maybe they deadened his sense of guilt (Kawabata 141).
The more Kikuji himself is drawn into the swamp of human desire, the more urgently he longs for eternal beauty and spiritual serenity to purify his desire (Carriere 52). The Inamura girl and her handkerchief motif of a Thousand Cranes become a symbol of his dreamworld of innocence and purity where the power of the grotesque birthmark cannot reach. Yet it is the grotesque birthmark itself that evokes man’s aspiration for the cleanness of the Inamura girl. It is Chikako who brings Kikuji to Inamura.
“If we are to be friends, I can’t help thinking we would have done better to have someone besides Kurimoto [Chikako] introduce us. I should apologize to you.” She looked at him suspiciously. “Why? If it hadn’t been for Miss Kurimoto, who could have introduced us?” It was a simple protest, and yet very much to the point. If it had not been for Chikako, the two would not have met in this world (Kawabata 53).
The tea ceremony where the two meet through Chikako symbolizes duality of man’s consciousness. It inspires man’s aspiration for purity and beauty, the world symbolized by the Inamura girl, but at the same time it makes man conscious of the existence of the ugly birthmark of life. The Inamura girl and Chikako are both the essence of tea. Even the seemingly timeless tea utensils have stains of human desire (Carriere 52). Beneath man’s aspiration for eternal beauty, there is always the curse of desire, and it leaves a stain on the artwork man creates. Mrs. Ota’s Shino cup, whose beauty is contained in its eternal serenity and which seems to transcend any owner’s life, is contaminated by man’s grotesque desire. Both Mrs. Ota and Fumiko believe that the brownish stain on it is Mrs. Ota’s lipstick stain.
The rim might have been stained by tea, and it might have been stained by lips. The color of faded lipstick, the color of a wilted red rose, the color of old, dry blood — Kikuji began to feel queasy. A nauseating sense of uncleanness and an overpowering fascination came simultaneously (Kawabata 104).
Kikuji is consoled by the cup’s serene beauty, is reminded vividly of Mrs. Ota’s sensuous body whenever he sees it. When he touches it, he becomes subject to the illusion that the Shino piece is Mrs. Ota and is terrified and guiltstricken by the persistence of his sexual attachment to her. He thinks of Mrs. Ota as a perfect work of art and the Shino cup as a perfect woman (Moore 145).
In sum, Kawabata portrays that life of a person is influenced by material and spiritual development and unique fate. Using unique symbols and themes (tea ceremony andbirth mark on Chikako’s breast) Kawabata unveils that escape from the curse of human desire takes the form of complete withdrawal from life, perhaps into death. In fact, the sense of waste occupies the central position in his view of life and is the main theme of the novel as well. By the time Kikuji realizes that he can be released from his darkness, Kikuji, annoyed by his entanglement in the swamp of desire and determined to free himself from his father’s curse, decides to give up tea and to sell his house as a symbol of his past and bad deeds.
Works Cited
Carriere, P. M. Writing as Tea Ceremony: Kawabata’s Geido Aesthetics. International Fiction Review, 2002, p. 52.
Kawabata, Y. Thousand Cranes. transl. by Edward G. Seidensticker. Vintage, 1996.
Moore, J. N. Thousand Cranes The English Journal. 71 (1990), 145-155.
Sister Mary Jo Moran, H.M. Recommended Yasunari Kawabata. The English Journal. 71 (1982), 75-76.