Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata (1964)

An aging man revisits his involvement at 30 with a teenage girl.

Book Review: Beauty and Sadness, beyond the impeccable title, is a deceptively simple story of wrong emotions and wrong actions. Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) subtly mixes emotions, memories, motives in this novel so that the reader is left unsure who is loving, who is hating, what is remembered, and what's been forgotten. Traditional views are crossed with the modern, and there are psychological issues, cruelty, revenge, and many shades of love, including jealousy and obsession. Innocence is here too: the innocence of an infatuated young girl, the innocence of a son who loves tradition. More than passion (though there is that), this is a novel of the mind, colder, more analytical. When one seeks revenge, is it revenge for another or for herself. A seduction many years before leads to another seduction many years later. In Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata looks at the variety of human connections, and uses descriptions of art as a vehicle for emotion, for love. Apparently simple, everything laid out, yet nothing is certain. An older man, an author, remembers and wishes to see his young lover from 20 years ago, which story he obliviously made into a novel. The once-young woman, now older, a successful traditional artist, still beautiful, still holds the memory of her young love. A beautiful young woman ("frighteningly pretty," "frighteningly beautiful"), an exponent of modern art, heedless of tradition, transforms all. Despite the two lovers' feelings, Kawabata explores whether love can be so wrong, so harmful, that it becomes poisonous decades later. A love, seemingly beautiful to the lovers, that causes so much sadness for everyone. "Beauty" and "sadness" are not opposites. Part of the sadness of external beauty is that it fades, is only a temporary trait, but inner beauty, for those who perceive it, may last forever. Beauty can be used to create sorrow here, but Beauty and Sadness is not a sad love story. There are moments of Mishima and Murakami. Typically I dislike May-December stories, such as older professors preying on female students. What aggravates the issue is when it's a 30 year-old man and a 15 year-old girl. With that caveat, there are Shakespearean levels of tragedy here.  [4★]