Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
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 horseback together? 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. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
