Dandelions
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating discovery, Kawabata’s unfinished final novel Dandelions is a great master’s last word
A fascinating discovery, Dandelions is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972.
Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions explores love and madness and consists almost entirely conversations between a woman identified only as Ineko's mother, and Kuno, a young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Clinic, a mental hospital, which she has entered for treatment of somagnosia, a condition that might be called “seizures of body blindness.” Although her vision as a whole is unaffected, she periodically becomes unable to see her lover Kuno. Whether this condition actually constitutes madness is a topic of heated discussion between Kuno and Ineko’s mother: Kuno believes Ineko's blindness is actually an expression of her love for him, as it is only he, the beloved, she cannot see.
In this tantalizing book, Kawabata explores the incommunicability of desire and carries the art of the novel, where he always suggested more than he stated, into mysterious and strange new realms. Dandelions is the final word of a truly great master, the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
