Kinshu

In the news recently - a man who supposedly made a suicide pact with his much younger mistress. He managed to kill her but failed to kill himself, not being able to handle her dying in front of him. He did succeed in clearing out her savings (obviously taking money's far easier than taking lives). However, he probably and unwittingly accomplished also the emotional deaths of his wife and children, who had no idea that the most important man in their lives was carrying on with another woman. While the papers go on about the trial and the truth, I wonder about the story of his family, the one that's left by the wayside, so easily looked over.

I mention this piece of news because I'm reading a book called Kinshu: Autumn Brocade, by Teru Miyamoto (translation by Roger K. Thomas). It's an epistolary novel, something we don't get too often these days. From the letters we learn of a failed double suicide (the lover dies, but the man survives) and a swift, quiet divorce with few words said between the couple. 10 years after, Aki meets her ex-husband as she takes her handicapped son up a mountain in a gondola. The son is a product of her second marriage (another sad one, it appears), and the chance meeting with her ex-husband makes her remember her earlier anger; surely his infidelity and their subsequent divorce resulted in her lot in life - caring for a mentally and physically handicapped child. Their letters reveal what they failed to say to each other 10 years before, and what their lives have become after the divorce and what they might be after this exchange of letters. Much of the emotion is tender and very real, seldom if at all histrionical - there's an elegance and dignity to the pathos in the novel.

I haven't got deeper but I'm interested to learn more about the novel's suggestion "that men's work may be less consequential than women's" (from Publisher's Weekly). I'm guessing that Aki's devotion and patience with her son ultimately is of greater significance than what her ex-husband, Yasuaki, has made of his life, never mind that both Aki and Yasuaki are not as happy as they wish to be. Aki, though, is at a better and calmer place in life than Yasuaki who - when Aki first sees him in the gondola - seems depressed, weary and unmoved by everything around him.

It's painful for the two of them to revisit the feelings they bore a decade before, but the letters help them, help him more than they do her, actually. The tone of his writing gradually eases into a semblance of acceptance and gratitude. He writes "And perhaps several years from now I'll get off at Koroen Station on the Hanshin Line, walk through the familiar residential area, and come to your house, right next to the tennis club. Maybe I'll look up at your house, at the big old mimosa tree, and quietly go home. Please keep well."

Posted by Monoceros at May 20, 2006 9:35 AM