古都

This one isn’t long, at 260 pages, but it took me a while to work through, and it spent a long time half-finished in the in-progress pile while I ignored it in favour of other books…

The book is set in Kyoto in the 1950s, and is about 千重子, a foundling who is taken in by a cloth-merchant family and raised as their only daughter. At the age of 20 she has a chance meeting with the twin sister she never knew she had, who was kept by their birth parents and raised in much poorer conditions in a village north of Kyoto. The whole story is set against the backdrop of the annual round of Kyoto festivals and seasonal observances, which Kawabata describes in some detail. There’s also a sub-theme about the decline of the traditional Kyoto weaving industry.

The difficulty I found in this book, apart from Kawabata’s usual preference for being elliptical rather than clear, is that everybody speaks in Kyoto dialect. That made it feel like a bit more effort to read and is part of why I left it half-read for months.

Kawabata says in the afterword that he wrote the book (which was first published as a serial work in the Mainichi newspaper) while he was abusing sleeping pills, to the extent that when he stopped taking them after finishing it, he had such severe withdrawal symptoms that he was hospitalized and spent 10 days in a coma. So he wrote the book in a drugged and unreal haze, and when he came to edit it for the book publication he had barely any memory of what he’d written. Kawabata says he fixed up the places which made no sense or where the plot didn’t line up but left some of the strangeness and disorder in as being part of what made the novel what it was. Alas, I am not good enough to notice that kind of stylistic detail while reading…