By Liu Yu
Izu is a place that stays cool even in summer. Though not far from Tokyo, it feels as if the seasons themselves have shifted. I visited Shuzenji during the pandemic — the very spot where the first hot spring appears in The Dancing Girl of Izu. A journey during the pandemic was always so impulsive, because the whole world seemed to stand still.
To the rhythm of swaying bells and the train moving at a steady pace, every street corner passed with a jingling, clattering sound. On days that were neither weekends nor peak season, the trains serving this area were quiet and deserted; even the transport cards that worked perfectly in the metropolis seemed to go on strike here. With the loose change left in my wallet, I bought a one-way ticket away from the city, heading to the hot-spring town.
In a perpetually tense life, when a rare chance to forget presents itself, you search for a space in time, wandering the old lanes to the sound of Honshu's train whistles. Rather than reopening the wounds of past heartaches over and over in your mind, it's better to think: through the ordinary days of dawn, cloudy skies, tomorrows, and the day before yesterday, people take on one another's colours. Everyone has a past.
Below I have selected three comments on The Dancing Girl of Izu. The first is the well-known Japanese literary translator in China, Lin Shaohua. The second is the writer I greatly admire, Yukio Mishima, and the last is Yu Hua. As a translator, a native writer, and a foreign reader respectively, they each offer remarkably similar interpretations of The Dancing Girl of Izu. For instance, they all emphasize the novel's limpidity, purity, and the melancholy of parting, and without exception set it in stark contrast to the cold, bleak nihilism of Snow Country, as though the former were a rare, bright yet fleeting dawn in Kawabata's creative spectrum. However, this very consensus is precisely a starting point worth re-examining. Lin Shaohua characterizes the journey as "self-healing," highlighting how the young man's inner aloofness finds relief in the dancing girl's innocence. This shows the translator's clear empathetic grasp of the text's mood, but does he too lightly turn the dancing girl into a tool for healing, overlooking the lowly circumstances of itinerant performers in Japanese society at the time? Yukio Mishima, proceeding from an aesthetic ontology, extols "the beauty of immaturity," a judgment consistent with his own obsession with youth, death, and beauty. Yet does his emphasis on "the absence of entanglement and desire" imply a deliberate dissolution of erotic or social tensions, thereby reducing the work to a stylized aesthetic object? Yu Hua, from the perspective of contemporary Chinese literary reception, sees that restrained, subtle sorrow as a source of enlightenment, which indeed reveals how Kawabata's delicate moods can move foreign readers. But is the narrative of "self-reconciliation" too complete, thereby diluting the persistent sense of powerlessness in the original text, born of class and age differences? All three critics focus on emotional resonance and aesthetic aftertaste, yet rarely ask: does this "hazy affection" never develop into possession because of adolescent shyness, or because of an unbridgeable social chasm between the young student and the dancing girl? Is the dancing girl's "purity" precisely the product of being gazed at and written about, rather than an expression of her own subjectivity? At the same time, their unanimous dichotomy between The Dancing Girl of Izu and Snow Country perhaps overlooks Kawabata's consistent undercurrent of "mono no aware" — the former is not without nihilism, but wraps it in a lighter manner; the latter is not wholly without light, but is suppressed by a more austere style. It can be said that while the views of these three critics are enlightening, to some extent they jointly construct a "myth of pure sentiment," taming the text's complexity into a gentle reading experience. If we re-examine the novella from the perspectives of narrative viewpoint, gender politics, or historical context, it may reveal richer textures, not just a clear reflection of a young man's state of mind. After all, beneath those mountain bells and hot-spring mists also settle the sighs of fate of wandering performers in the Taishō era, and the chill the writer himself could not articulate.
Kawabata, too, set out on his journey with a restless heart, and in the midst of it all began a voyage of mutual entanglement.
Liu Yu is the lead editor of the cultural commentary "A Thousand Hamlets." Liu holds a BA in English Literature from HKBU and an MA in History from HKU.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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