A Letter to Kawabata Yasunari

In the September issue of Bungei Shunju you wrote of me disparagingly: After all, The
Flowers of Buffoonery is full of the life and the literary views of its author, but it seems to me that
there is an unpleasant cloud surrounding the authors personal life at present, and, regrettably,
this prevents his talent from being expressed as it should be.
Let us not bandy inept lies. When, standing in the front of a bookshop, I read the words you had
written, I was deeply aggrieved. From the way you had written, it was quite as if you alone had
decided who should and should not receive the Akutagawa Prize. This was not your writing.
Without doubt, someone had made you write this. What is more, you were even exerting yourself
to make this obvious.
The Flowers of Buffoonery is a piece I wrote three years ago, in the summer of my twenty-fourth
year. Then, it bore the title, The Sea. I gave it to my friends, Kon Kaniichi and Ima Uhei, to read,
but compared with the version that exists today it was a very rough piece of work with none of the
monologues now belonging to the I of the narrative. It was simply the narrative itself a plain but
structurally sound story. That autumn I borrowed Gides essay on Dostoyevsky from Akamatsu
Gessen, who lived in the neighbourhood, and reading it set me to thinking; I took that primitive
even formal work of mine, The Sea, tore it to pieces, and put it back together as a work in
which the face of the I was to be found everywhere in the text. In this way I believed I had
created a work the like of which had not been seen before in Japan; boasting as much, I passed it
around my friends. I had my friends Nakamura Chihei and Kubo Ryuuichiro, and also Mr Ibuse,
who lived nearby, read it, and it was well received. Encouraged by this, I revised it further. I made
deletions and additions, and wrote the whole thing afresh five times before putting it away
carefully in a paper bag in the cupboard.
At around New Year this year, my friend Dan Kazuo read this manuscript.
Hey, he said, This is a masterpiece! You must send this to a magazine. Ill try taking it to
Kawabata Yasunari. Kawabata is sure to understand a work like this.
Soon after that I came to an impasse in my writing. I went on a journey, prepared, in my heart, as
it were, to die in the wilderness. This incident caused a little stir.
However much my elder brother berated me, that was fine, I just needed to borrow five hundred
yen. And then, I could try again. I returned to Tokyo. Thanks to the trouble taken by my friends, I
managed to secure from my brother, for a two or three year period starting then, an allowance of
fifty yen a month. Immediately I set about looking for lodgings, but while I was still searching I was
stricken with appendicitis and admitted to the Shinohara hospital at Asagaya. Septic pus had
seeped into the peritoneum. I had been diagnosed a little too late. I was admitted on the fourth of
April, this year. Nakatani Takao came to visit me. Join the Japanese romantic movement, he
urged. To celebrate, I shall publish The Flowers of Buffoonery. These are the matters we
discussed. The Flowers of Buffoonery was in the possession of Dan Kazuo. I insisted that it
would be best if Dan Kazuo took the manuscript to Mr Kawabata. Due to the pain from the
incision in my stomach, I was quite unable to move. Then, my lung became infected. For many
days I was unconscious. My wife informed me afterwards that the doctor had declared he could
no longer take responsibility for my fate. For a full month I lay in the surgical ward, and even to lift
my head was a struggle. In May I was transferred to the Kyodo Hospital for internal diseases in
Setagaya Ward. I was there for two months. On the first of July the organisation of the hospital
was to be changed, all the staff were to be replaced and so on, and as a result, the patients all
had to leave. My brother and his acquaintance, a tailor by the name of Kita Hoshiro, discussed
the matter and decided to move me to a place in Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture. I spent the days
collapsed in a rattan chair, taking a light constitutional stroll at morning and evening. Once a
week, a doctor came from Tokyo. This state of affairs continued for two months, when, at the end
of August, I stood in a bookshop, read a copy of Bungei Shunju, and discovered what you had
written: an unpleasant cloud surrounding the authors personal life at present etc. etc. To

tell the truth, I burned with rage. For many nights I found it hard to sleep on this account.
Is breeding exotic birds and going to see the dance, Mr Kawabata, really such an exemplary
lifestyle? Ill stab him! That is what I thought. The mans an utter swine, I thought. But then,
suddenly, I felt the twisted, hot, passionate love that you bore towards me a love such as that of
Nellie in Dostoyevskys The Insulted and the Injured fill me to my very core. It cant be! It cant
be! I shook my head in denial. But your love, beneath your affected coldness violent, deranged,
Dostoyevskian love made my body burn as with fever. And, whats more, you did not know a
thing about it.
I am not attempting to engage in a contest of wits with you. In the words that you wrote I sensed
worldly ties and smelt the bitter sadness of financial concerns. I merely wanted to make this
known to two or three devoted readers. It is something that I have to make known. We are
beginning to doubt that there is beauty in the moral path of subservience.
I think of Kikuchi Kan, wiping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, grinning and saying,
Well, I suppose its better this way. We havent lost anything in the end, and I too smile like a
fool. It really is better this way, it seems. I did feel a little sorry for Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, but what am I talking about? This, too, is part of those worldly ties.
Mr Ishikawa is an example to us all. In that sense he is dispensing his duties with deep sincerity.
Its just that I feel dissatisfied. That Kawabata Yasunari tried to assume a casual attitude in his
lying, but couldnt quite cut it I cant help being dissatisfied at this. It should not have been this
way. It really should not have been this way. You have to be more aware, in your dealings, that a
writer lives in the midst of absurdity and imperfection.