Bamboo Voice Peach Blossom: Speech, Silence, and Subjective Experience

Abstract

K Pr AWABATA YASUNARI )JlMZ (1899-1972) published very little fiction after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. According to the chronology included in the most recent edition of his collected works, I only three stories appeared in print between 1968 and his death four years later. The second of these three was Take no koe momo no hana tROrtF] 4LC, which was published in the December 1970 issue of Chuo koron / and is translated here as Bamboo Voice Peach Blossom. But even before he received the Nobel Prize, Kawabata' s production of fiction had shown a marked decrease, as during the 1960s he became burdened by fame and his commitments to the cultural community. These obligations were reflected in the large number of essays and occasional writings that continued to appear under his name. Many of these essays were eulogies or remembrances for friends and colleagues recently deceased; they were marked by an autumnal discourse of fatigue, loneliness, and sadness. Bamboo Voice Peach Blossom is at once a lyrical and fragile miniature and a surprisingly robust text. Given that it is Kawabata' s penultimate work of fiction, a reader inclined towards a biographical or chronological approach might read it as something of a valedictory-a culmination of a lifetime of writing. Like most texts, however, it, as demonstrated by Richard Torrance for Yukiguni T ' (Snow Country),2 incorporates a variety of discourses that will reward many types of reading, from traditional exegesis to the theoretical and ideological. Considering the story's position as one of Kawabata's final fictional texts, it has received surprisingly little critical attention, even in Japan. The only substantial critical essay on it, by Baba Shigeyuki ,Fi.Y*T, was published in 1981.3 Baba's essay, invaluable for its identification of the sources of many of Kawa-