Review: The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Haydn Trowell)

Travelling by train through a wintry, greyscale Japanese landscape, Asako sees something strange: a rainbow over a lake. “It seemed as though, all of a sudden, it had floated to the surface.” There’s something else strange: in the train compartment with her is a man and his baby daughter, whom he cares for diligently. They’re returning from Kyōto to Tōkyō, where Asako had visited, unbeknownst to her father, in search of a half-sister. At home in Tōkyō, Asako lives with her architect father Mizuhara Tsuneo and other half-sister Momoko. Both their mothers are dead.

Where Asako is kind to the point of insipid (“she’s kind to everyone. She can be quite pushy about it. Really, she can be such a nuisance,” her sister says), Momoko is brash, speaks her mind, serially miserable. At the beginning of The Rainbow she’s stringing along two boys. “When someone plays with danger,” Asako notes, “It’s because they’re harbouring a wound that’s eating them from inside.” “From siblings come strangers,” Kawabata quotes, and The Rainbow forensically examines the distances that lie between family members, as it reveals the wounds that are eating away at them. It wonders what might reconnect people — across time, space, between life and death — “a bridge between two souls might well be a rainbow”.

Much of The Rainbow is structured around tourism, with Asako, Momoko and their father visiting Kyōto under various guises where they take turns around the city’s gardens and temples. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Is that plant such and such?

No, it’s this other plant.

It’s strange that it is blooming now, it makes me remember things.

The delight of Kawabata’s writing is his attention to nature; he draws in the scenery with the grace and spareness of Nihonga painting, laden with meaning. Sometimes it is ecstatic. Asako and a friend visit a temple:

“The haircap moss is flowering!” they said in unison, before meeting each other’s gaze.

The stems were thinner than silken threads, almost invisible to the naked eye. They were like little naked stamens floating just above the green sheet of moss.

The flowers looked to be frozen in place, but on closer inspection, Asako could see that they were swaying almost imperceptibly from side to side.

They had both been struck by the subtle beauty of those small flowers, expressing their amazement almost at the exact same moment.

At other times it evokes alienation, as when Mizuhara encounters a camellia when meeting with his former lover and is “caught by the impression” that the great flower “was blooming in a far-off world”.

Kawabata’s focus on the domestic drama of the Mizuhara family is punctuated by details that pierce the novel. Mizuhara laments the fate of old temples and estates that are being converted to inns after the war and the “apres-guerre children” who are “like raging bulls, always breaking this and that”. A play is being staged for the first time in years, dating the novel’s action to 1950. Mizuhara’s friend in Kyoto discusses the bombing of Hiroshima: “all we can do is sit around eating boiled tofu and the like and wait quietly for whatever the future has in store for us”. Mizuhara evokes the Buddhist principle to “throw away this house, throw away that house”. That understandable fatalism pervades the novel, an “affliction of the soul” (equally though, we could probably be less attached to the material in a consumerist world). Everything is in flux; what was once certain is now mutable. Social standing has been turned upside down: war heroes are now condemned as criminals, fathers might nurse their children. Unsurprisingly then, the novel’s conclusion is quietly despairing, even as it allows for dignity and beauty, like snow closing over a landscape.

Gay rating: 3/5 for queer characters and relationships, although with tragic ends.