Beauty and Sadness

This will be short. I just finished reading my third of Yasunari Kawabata's numerous great novels, Beauty and Sadness. And I have this to say...

I have tremendous respect for Yasunari Kawabata's absorbing storytelling that almost always goes with a cunning twist, his impeccable suggestiveness, rich visualisation and insights into complex characters. But why, oh why, are all the female characters in his novel silently-suffering tragic figures? In Beauty and Sadness, a woman is made to type out the manuscript of her novelist husband’s partly non-fiction novel depicting his own affair with a fifteen years old girl. And his young mistress is to have a miscarriage, separate from him yet finds herself forever entangled in the web of their lost embrace, never to love again or marry. Cruelly, in the end, already a mother of two grown-up children, the wife is to suffer a somewhat similar fate (no, I have no wish to plant a plot spoiler here): an act of vengeance indirectly resulting from the affair. At times, I could imagine - and I am pretty sure he did - Mr Yasunari Kawabata grinning at his own ingenuity, and almost laughing out loud thinking of his readers who would lose themselves in the plot, and turn pale and breathless at the shocking conclusion. So stunning was it that it took me some dwelling before sinking in. Kudos to Yasunari Kawabata, I can't even decide which is my favourite of his three novels; Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain or Beauty and Sadness? Perhaps, I should just let it be.

Women are such beautiful, delicate creatures, yet sad to say, their destiny and happiness lie in the hands of the men they love; or so it seems, so it seems…Then again, what is definite is that, never, ever offend a woman (haha...just for laugh). Don’t say I didn’t tell you, you have been warned.

Oops, I guess I got carried away, so this entry has turned out pretty long by my standard.