[9/10]
Unseen, in mountain depths
the autumn leaves scatter
like brocade under cloak of night.
The original Japanese title, Kinshu comes from classic haiku poetry and illustrates a certain spiritual state, a mix of beauty and sadness, of regrets and acceptance of the passing time. I found the poem by Ki no Tsurayuki (ca. 872-945) in the afterword of this novel and I thought it captures my own emotional reaction to this moving, delicate story of a man and a woman meeting at a mountain resort ten years after their dramatic divorce.
After the shock of their accidental and brief reunion, Katsunuma Aki and Arima Yasuaki start an exchange of letters in an effort to make sense of the still painful memories of separation.
It has been ten years since we parted, and our lives are no longer each other’s business. And yet there is no way I will find closure unless you give me a full account of your romance.
Why did such a feeling come over me? I hardly understand myself, but I suddenly wanted to run after you. There were things I desperately wanted to ask you. How were you living now? How have you spent the ten years since we parted? If Kiyotaka hadn’t been with me, I might well have run after you.
>>><<<>>><<<
This is the first time I have in my hands a book by Teru Miyamoto, and it has made me an instant fan, same as it happened after I watched my first movie by Yasujiro Ozu. There is something powerful and convincing in the silent restraint on the faces of these characters that cover hidden depths and tumultuous hearts.
There is also something honest and true in the pen or brush poised above a white page, a laying open of the heart in a letter as a cry of release from loneliness and doubt.
Is letter writing becoming a lost art in our age of computers and AI generated texts? Reading the story of Aki and Yasuaki made me try to remember when was the last time I wrote a long letter and who did I send it to? Surely, it must have been before I opened my first mailbox, before my messages got shorter and shorter, postcard style. Reading Kinshu is like a trip down memory lane to a time when I found it easier to write a very long letter about my feelings than to talk face to face with the girl they were addressed to.
This is what happens to these two lonely people in a cable car climbing the slopes of Mount Zao: nothing of substance is spoken, their beating hearts too loud for rational thinking – a missed opportunity before they get separated again. But a letter is something else: it gives one time to ponder and to put in order one’s thoughts, to give freely and to receive those stories that were lost in the forced separation.
Dear Yasuaki,
The ancient mimosa tree in the garden has again produced an abundance of tiny, yellow blossoms this year. [...]
Every time I hold mimosa branches, I am momentarily overcome by an odd sensation of pain and sadness.
This is not only the story of Aki and Yasuaki. It necessarily starts with the events that lead to the divorce: the husband caught in a suicide pact in a secret love hotel with a waitress named Seo Yukako. Yasuaki barely survives the knife cut to his throat. Aki’s father, a powerful businessman and owner of the Hoshijima Construction Company, forces Aki to ask for a divorce before she has a chance to talk things over with Yasuaki.
She returns to the family home in a rich district of Kyoto, while Yasuaki disappears in the underworld of poverty and criminality. Ten years later, Aki is in a loveless marriage with a professor and has a son with a severe congenital disability named Kiyotaka. Yasuaki is on the run from the yakuza for bad checks and is supported by a woman who works in a convenience store named Reiko.
The letters exchanged between the two cover the childhood meeting of Yasuaki and Seo Yukako, the years of self doubt and regrets for Aki, the story of a an elderly couple who open a cafe where they only play music by Mozart, Reiko’s ambition to leave a dead end job and start her own business and Aki’s father own secrets of the heart that interfere with his workaholic persona.
I wasn’t expecting, after the emotional debut, to find so many side stories dealing with class relationships and integrity, with the role of art in our lives and the importance of keeping in touch with natural cycles.
It’s strange, but human beings definitely behave in accordance with the rhythms of nature.
I don’t think the lives of these people would have followed the same paths outside of Japan. Respect for the authority of the parents, for honest work and for emotional restraint can and will lead to repression of one’s true nature and failures in communication. Even the traditional gender roles for men and women need a serious re-appraisal:
Male infidelity is like an instinct from which there is no escape. Most men are just built that way. “What a self-serving excuse!” women will say indignantly – but it’s true and it can’t be helped.
This is where a letter can help, maybe more than a visit to a psychiatrist. Aki is forced to take a second look at her own life choices as she reads the revelations in the letters written by Yasuaki. Instead of blame and sadness, she must reconsider her marriage to another man who hides his infidelities, her emancipation from under her father’s strictures and her true priorities in life. She has ... a dear, dear child who was born into the world with a burden of unhappiness. . Kiyotaka needs her full attention and love. Once she has made her peace with the past and with her chronic depression, with a little help from Jupiter Symphony No. Forty-one in C Major, Mozart’s last, Aki can look upon the fallen leaves of autumn not in despair but with quiet determination.
I wonder how I can overcome my karma. Must I just walk into the future passively, accepting whatever happens? No. I must live in the present and strive earnestly and ardently to make Kiyotaka as much of an ordinary person as possible. As his mother, I simply cannot sink into a state of resignation and nihilism.
Some of this new found strength and integrity must have been passed on to her correspondent, because Arima Yasuaki must decide between running away once more from his responsibilities or accepting a love freely given, if undeserved.
“The autumn leaves are at their best now,” said Father.
>>><<<>>><<<
I was inspired, after the last letter, to look through my couple of haiku anthologies for other autumn poems, in an effort to stay for one moment more with this autumnal emotion, while outside my apartment window late autumn lays down its cold mist and the trees in the park lose the last of their summer leaves
As dew drips
gently, gently, the dove
murmurs its chant
—Issa
On a withered branch
lingers the evanescent memory
of a cicada’s voice
—Kagai
Fallen leaves
fall on each other—
rain beats on the rain
—Kyotai
Et la vie sépare ceux qui s'aiment,
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit.
Et la mer efface sur le sable,
Les pas des amants désunis.
— Jacques Prevert