Writing as Tea Ceremony: Kawabata's Geido Aesthetics

In his article "Alternative Modernity? Playing the Japanese Game of Culture" (1994), Andrew Feenberg suggests that Yasunari Kawabata's novel The Master of Go (1954) embodies the Zen Buddhist principle that playing Go in traditional Japan constituted a quest for self-realization and a path to spiritual unity--in effect, a "Tao," or "Way," the Way of Go. (1) The goal of the contest was not victory but spiritual enlightenment: as a momentary refugee from culture, the self was reduced by subjection to rule and struggle to the nothingness of Zen, and the game became an agent of consciousness effacement, the Zen "no-mind" that is a prerequisite for spiritual unity. This insight, that immersion in Go constituted a Way in traditional Japanese culture, suggests that Kawabata's immersion in the aesthetics of religion and culture was an attempt to create an aesthetic Way in the spirit of cha-no-yu, or tea ceremony, which he described in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 12 December 1968 as "sad, austere, autumnal," concealing "a great richness of spirit." (2) The object of the tea ceremony is to awaken or reinforce in the participant a sense of cultural identity and spiritual connection through its ritualized aesthetics. The object of other forms of aesthetic rituals, such as the art of fiction, for instance, might do the same. Indeed, such a connection between art and religion flourished during Japan's medieval period (950-1400), when "religious and aesthetic values became virtually co-terminous in what was called geido--the `Tao' (or Way) of aesthetics." (3) This essay will examine the aesthetic, cultural, religious, and historical contexts out of which Kawabata's prewar masterpiece Snow Country (1947) and his last novel, Beauty and Sadness (1961), emerged in order to show that geido was an abiding element of Kawabata's fiction. The phrase "alternative modernity" implies that Kawabata's modernism differs from traditional understandings of the term. By definition, however, the art of modernism is subjective, recondite, esoteric, and avant-garde. Furthermore, the symbolist aesthetic often noted in Kawabata, with its emphasis on spirituality and culture, informs the works of modernism's most celebrated writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and W. B. Yeats. Yeats's well-known affinity for Japan originated in his symbolist perception that Japan supported a culture infused with myth, legend, and a hazy kind of spirtualism arising out of a unique blending of Shinto and Buddhism. Because of geido's similarity to the symbolist writing of some modernists, critics often suggest that Kawabata's art tends toward the symbolic. Gwen Boardman relates that in Kawabata's rewriting of Snow Country, his characterizations went from "more `realistic' and straightforward to `lyrical' and symbolic." (4) According to Paul St. John Mackintosh, Snow Country "does the native spirit good by going back to the oldest Japanese literary traditions," and yet the novel is "modern in its narrative discontinuity and almost symbolist imagery." (5) And Kawabata's involvement with other young artists in the Shinkankaku-Ha and its publication Bungei Jidai (1924) was, according to Boardman, "a reaction against the naturalistic writing and the `proletarian' literature of their time." (6) When this same reaction in Europe takes a spiritual direction, it is labeled symbolist, though the difference is that symbolism is subjective and somewhat occult, whereas geido uses aesthetics as a Way within Buddhism, an established religion. Western discussions of Kawabata's art imply that his fiction may be grasped either in terms of unique Japanese aesthetic categories or Western existentialism. In "Elements of Existentialism in Modern Fiction," Mita Luz de Manuel suggests that Kawabata's modernism originates in the pervasive existential personality of his characters, that he "may well have connected Buddhist `emptiness' or `nothingness' with the nihilism of Western philosophy. …