Yasunari Kawabata Quotes & Sayings

Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain. — Yasunari Kawabata

Do you think it's right to not say goodbye to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of your very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his. — Yasunari Kawabata

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love
where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when? — Yasunari Kawabata

The course of one's life is a difficult thing."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year — Yasunari Kawabata

You think I'm drunk and talking nonsense? I'm not. I would know she was being well taken care of, and I could go pleasantly to seed here in the mountains. It would be a fine, quiet feeling. — Yasunari Kawabata

If you wanna be somebody be yourself dont try to be anybody your not — Yasunari Kawabata

Women are odd," he said, to extricate himself. "Two or three of them have told me they're sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I'd had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?" "Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions. — Yasunari Kawabata

The window of the waiting-room was clear for an instant as the train started to move. Komako's face glowed forth, and as quickly disappeared. It was the bright red it had been in the mirror that snowy morning, and for Shimamura that color again seemed to be the point at which he parted with reality. — Yasunari Kawabata

Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty. — Yasunari Kawabata

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire. — Yasunari Kawabata

[ ... ] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. — Yasunari Kawabata

This is no world for gentle people — Yasunari Kawabata

Long accustomed to a life of self-indulgent solitude, he began to yearn for the beauty of giving himself to others. The nobility of the word 'sacrifice' became clear to him. He took satisfaction in the feeling of his own littleness as a single seed whose purpose was to carry forward from the past into the future the life of the species called humanity. He even sympathized with the thought that the human species, together with the various kinds of minerals and plants, was no more than a small pillar that helped support a single vast organism adrift in the cosmos
and with the thought that it was no more precious than the other animals and plants. — Yasunari Kawabata

It's not right to live so long in this world only moving backward."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year — Yasunari Kawabata

Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this."
-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year — Yasunari Kawabata

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. — Yasunari Kawabata

Here in our mountains, the snow falls even on the maple leaves. — Yasunari Kawabata

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger. — Yasunari Kawabata

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again. — Yasunari Kawabata

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they were near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly. — Yasunari Kawabata

A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn. — Yasunari Kawabata

As death approaches, memory erodes. Recent memories are the first to succumb. Death works its way backward until it reaches memory's earliest beginnings. Then memory flares up for an instant, just like a flame about to go out. That is the 'prayer in the mother tongue.'"

-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue — Yasunari Kawabata

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere. — Yasunari Kawabata

Father's life was only a very small part of the life of a tea bowl. — Yasunari Kawabata

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy. — Yasunari Kawabata

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die. — Yasunari Kawabata

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. — Yasunari Kawabata

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight's play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl's breast. — Yasunari Kawabata

And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment. — Yasunari Kawabata

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.
The day you die. — Yasunari Kawabata

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. — Yasunari Kawabata

But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.
"You write down your criticisms, do you?"
"I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all."
"But what good does it do?"
"None at all."
"A waste of effort."
"A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.
A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence. — Yasunari Kawabata

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate. — Yasunari Kawabata

Funerals often inspired me to consider the lives and the deaths of people who were close to me. And, in the repose of contemplation, my heart grew still. The more distant my connection with the deceased, the more I felt moved to go to the cemetery, accompanied by my own memories, to burn incense and press my palms together in devotion to those memories. So it was that as a youth, my decorous behavior at the funerals of strangers was never feigned; rather, it was a manifestation of the capacity of sadness I had within myself."
-from "The Master of Funerals — Yasunari Kawabata

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches. — Yasunari Kawabata

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice. — Yasunari Kawabata

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?'
'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it. — Yasunari Kawabata

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open. — Yasunari Kawabata

She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes looked like flocks of gentle green sheep. — Yasunari Kawabata

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached. — Yasunari Kawabata

It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us — Yasunari Kawabata

Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I'm watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people. — Yasunari Kawabata

Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain. — Yasunari Kawabata

Is it a boy or a girl?"
"It's a girl. Really! Can't you tell by looking at it?
"Is it mine?"
"It is not."
"Oh? Well, if it is, you needn't say so now. You can say when you feel like it. Years and years from now."
"It is not. It really is not. I haven't forgotten that I loved you, but you are not to imagine things. — Yasunari Kawabata

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice ... — Yasunari Kawabata

I gave myself up
to my tears. It was as though my head had turned to clear water, it was
falling pleasantly away drop by drop; soon nothing would remain. — Yasunari Kawabata

Perhaps they don't realize where they were, so they went on living. — Yasunari Kawabata

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain. — Yasunari Kawabata

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser. — Yasunari Kawabata

Thinking to be tactful and adroit, the woman stood — Yasunari Kawabata

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it. — Yasunari Kawabata

After all, only women are able really to love. — Yasunari Kawabata

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night. — Yasunari Kawabata

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development. — Yasunari Kawabata

One can't stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one? ... When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained ... — Yasunari Kawabata

When you die, there is nothing
only a life that will be forgotten."
-from "Gathering Ashes — Yasunari Kawabata

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace. — Yasunari Kawabata

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar. — Yasunari Kawabata

The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. — Yasunari Kawabata

Twenty years old, I had embarked on this trip to Izu heavy with resentment that my personality had been permanently warped by my orphan's complex and that I would never be able to overcome a stifling melancholy. So I was inexpressibly grateful to find that I looked like a nice person as the world defines the word."

-from "The Dancing Girl of Izu — Yasunari Kawabata

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself. — Yasunari Kawabata

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. — Yasunari Kawabata

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. — Yasunari Kawabata

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. — Yasunari Kawabata

Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it. The — Yasunari Kawabata

Maybe vagueness has been good for me. The word means two different things in Tokyo and Osaka, you know. In Tokyo it means stupidity, but in Osaka they talk about vagueness in a painting and in a game of Go. — Yasunari Kawabata

A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance. — Yasunari Kawabata

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning. — Yasunari Kawabata

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke. — Yasunari Kawabata

You've always been fond of understanding people too well."
"They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily. — Yasunari Kawabata

No, it didn't hurt. He didn't want to lose any black hair, and he was careful to pull out the white hairs one by one. But when he had finished, the skin was drawn and shriveled. It hurt when you ran your hand over it, the doctor said. It didn't bleed, but it was raw and red. Finally he was put in a mental hospital ... He didn't want to be old, he wanted to be young again. No one seems to know whether he started pulling it out because he had lost his mind, or he lost his mind because he pulled out too much. — Yasunari Kawabata

He heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world. — Yasunari Kawabata

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body. — Yasunari Kawabata

And I can't complain. After all, only woemn are able really to love — Yasunari Kawabata

A feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman's being. — Yasunari Kawabata

The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings. — Yasunari Kawabata

Even when natural weather is good, human weather is bad. — Yasunari Kawabata

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love. — Yasunari Kawabata

What seemed strangest to me when I found this diary was that I have no recollection of the day-to-day life it describes. If I do not recall them, where have those days gone? Where had they vanished to? I pondered the things that human beings lose to the past"

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year — Yasunari Kawabata

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony. — Yasunari Kawabata

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face. — Yasunari Kawabata

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words ... — Yasunari Kawabata

Anyway, it's hardly a problem worth worrying about. — Yasunari Kawabata

Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the "clear heart" of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light. — Yasunari Kawabata

The baby understands that its mother loves it. [ ... ] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love. — Yasunari Kawabata

What I believe to be memories are probably daydreams. Still, my own sentimentality yearns for them as if they were the truth, suspect or twisted though they may be. I have forgotten that they were stories I heard from another and feel an intimacy with them as if they were my own direct memories"
-from "Oil — Yasunari Kawabata

Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."
-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue — Yasunari Kawabata

My head hasn't been very clear these last few days. I suppose that's why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be as clean as they are. I was thinking on the train - if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off - well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. 'Do this up for me, please,' you'd say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming. — Yasunari Kawabata