Dandelions

by Yasunari Kawabata, Michael Emmerich (Translator)

Overview

A fascinating discovery, Kawabata’s unfinished final novel Dandelions is a great master’s last word

A fascinating discovery, Dandelions is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972.

Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions explores love and madness and consists almost entirely conversations between a woman identified only as Ineko's mother, and Kuno, a young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Clinic, a mental hospital, which she has entered for treatment of somagnosia, a condition that might be called “seizures of body blindness.” Although her vision as a whole is unaffected, she periodically becomes unable to see her lover Kuno. Whether this condition actually constitutes madness is a topic of heated discussion between Kuno and Ineko’s mother: Kuno believes Ineko's blindness is actually an expression of her love for him, as it is only he, the beloved, she cannot see.

In this tantalizing book, Kawabata explores the incommunicability of desire and carries the art of the novel, where he always suggested more than he stated, into mysterious and strange new realms. Dandelions is the final word of a truly great master, the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811224093
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/12/2017
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	214,460
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Best known in the West for such novels as Snow Country, Beauty and Sadness, and A Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Michael Emmerich is an associate professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California. He is the author of “The Tale of Genji”: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature and the translator of numerous books from the Japanese.

Editorial Reviews

10/02/2017
As much a philosophical dialogue as a work of fiction, this final, unfinished novel by the Nobel laureate Kawabata (1899–1972) is a gentle study of madness. Suffering from a condition called somagnosia that makes her unable to see the bodies of others, Ineko is committed to a provincial asylum described as “a pool where all the toxins of the human heart accumulate.” Though both her mother and her lover, Kuno, trace Ineko’s condition to her having witnessed her father’s death, they cannot agree on a deeper reason for her suffering. Kuno ascribes the tragedy to fate, while Ineko’s mother wonders whether “each of us carries inside of us the potential for madness.” The pair talk in circles that draw them into an enchanting, if foreboding, past: Ineko’s mother recalls her daughter being the type of child who “felt sorry for fallen flowers.” Though Kawabata’s vision for this novel was never fully realized, the beauty and wisdom seeping out of every sentence still infuse it with enormous emotional potency. As Kuno finally settles down to sleep, he asks Ineko’s mother, “Life goes on, from a child to the child’s child, but for how long?” In the case of the characters captured here, not nearly long enough. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

A novel about absences, the near impossibility of human connection, the imperfect yet overpowering nature of memory, and the shortcomings of sight. Dandelions intrigues as an unfinished work.

Will Harrison - The Hudson Review

A literary habitat like no other—quietly devastating fiction. Behind a lyrical and understated surface, chaotic passions pulse.

The Independent (London)

If we read Dandelions not as an unfinished masterpiece but as a work in dialogue with the themes of love, desire, and the language beyond language, it feels not broken off but rather open to possibility, trembling with the potential for interpretation. Rather than longing for what lies beyond the final page, we can turn our attention to what has already been presented, however mysteriously, and consider it from different perspectives, as one turns a faceted crystal under a light.

Larissa Pham - The Nation

Yasunari Kawabata's final novel Dandelions is a treasure, unfinished due to the author's sad death, but remarkably whole and deeply gorgeous. A woman named Ineko is quietly committed to a mental institution in a placid small town, and afterwards, her beloved, Kuno, and Ineko's mother discuss illness, fate, karma, death, suffering, and marriage. There's so much pleasure in these conversations, and the urgency and familial frictions of the present occasion lend a lovely intimate realism to the philosophizing. Inez's affliction, "body blindness," seems part of a curious exploration of trauma. As in Kawabata's Palm of the Hand stories, this novel rings with echoes of past tragedy, and the language is richly pleasurable and imagistic. Certain lines haunt like poetic refrains: "Married couples can accommodate all kinds of peculiar things," "A bell isn't a body," and "To enter the Buddha world is easy, to enter the world of demons is difficult."

Gini Balibrera - Literati Bookstore

Yasunari Kawabata’s lusciously peculiar novel Dandelions was unfinished when he took his life in 1972. It’s a story of love and loss and mania, told in sparse, arresting prose.

The Paris Review - The Paris Review

There are few other writers who could invoke such a lasting memory of a single image with so few words.

San Francisco Chronicle

Kawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time.

New York Times Book Review

Kawabata’s novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time.

The New York Times Book Review

There are few other writers who could invoke such a lasting memory of a single image with so few words.

San Francisco Chronicle

12/01/2017
Left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972, Nobel Prize winner Kawabata's meditation on madness is nevertheless wholly satisfying. Ineko has been taken to the Ikuta Mental Hospital by her mother and her lover, Mr. Kuno, who wants desperately to marry Ineko. But she suffers from a bizarre and exceedingly rare affliction: she is sometimes unable to see the body of Mr. Kuno. The pearlescent prose relates a sparring, increasingly agitated exchange as the mother and lover walk away from the hospital with Ineko ringing its bells in the background. Why is Ineko so disturbed? Does it have anything to do with the accidental death of her father, a solider during the war, as the two rode horsebacktogether? Is Mr. Kuno right that "sanity and madness are two sides of the same coin"? Why does Mr. Kuno think he sees, improbably, a white rat and a white dandelion? VERDICT Philosophical yet touched by an eerie magic; for sophisticated readers and lovers of smart, spooky tales.

Library Journal

2017-09-04
Pensive last novel by Kawabata, unfinished at the time of the author's 1972 suicide but still capable of standing on its own.Flowers, bells, wounded trees: the natural and human worlds meet and mingle in this slender, sharply honed narrative. The title is also the first word: "Dandelions cover the banks of Ikuta River." A renga could grow from that lyrical line, which instead sets the scene for the jolting follow-on: the river and the town that lies alongside it may be placid and lovely, but it is also the site of an asylum to which Kizaki Ineko has been exiled. Her illness, somagnosia, is the inability to perceive the bodies of others. The condition, naturally, affects her ability to relate to others as well: the fellow asylum inmate who writes, calligraphically, "To enter the Buddha world is easy; to enter the world of demons is difficult," is to her simply a floating brush, while her boyfriend, Kuno, is a specter. Much of the novel is given over to back and forth between Ineko and her mother, who rather unhelpfully is a repository of oddments about Ineko and her condition, including the tragic story of a somagnosic mother who murdered her baby: "How is that possible? To be unable to see your own baby's head, to wring a neck that isn't even visible to you." An extended metaphor about social distance and loneliness seems to be at play, but so, too, is Ineko's quest for meaning, the origins of her illness unfolding in a tragedy involving her father. "Perhaps the origins of philosophy are there," she says wisely, "in that period when infants start to become aware of their surroundings, when they start to see, to remember words." Why she has chosen not to see may be a mystery, but then so is much about this enigmatic story.World literature lost a fine voice with Kawabata's death, to which this elegantly puzzling work stands as testimonial.

Kirkus Reviews

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