Before this I had only read his essay, 'In Praise of Shadows' - which is a beautiful read and an aesthetic experience in itself.
I bought Makioka Sisters after the trip to Japan. This year or last 12 months I have read a lot, a lot of Japanese fiction - new, old. Most of Kawabata (though Snow Country was read long time back and perhaps needs a revisit), discovered Natsume Soseki (his Three-Cornered World one of my highly loved reads, and reading it I keep searching for similar reading experiences - but one finds it perhaps only in poetry from ancient China or Japan). The sense of the world and life is very different in poetry and such aesthetic works from that region. Very very different from the other Western readings from the same period. There is an airy quality to it, where Western words seem solid, somehow defined, Japan allows for definitions. I don't know if I express myself well, but there's a freedom in these writings which somehow make Western thought appear very rigid and the business of life very serious, such that they forget the aesthetics and wonder of life.
Anyhow, Makioka sisters (I am somewhere half-way in the novel), is about four sisters and their life and times in Japan of 1930s. Osaka region mostly. Tokyo some. Reading it one of the phrase keeps resounding rightly or wrongly - a novel of manners. It is sort of a story but also a documentary of life and times of Japan of that time. There is movement forward but there is as much about the way of life, about little matters of day to day life which are so different in Japan compared to where I have grown up. Like they view the moon in a ceremony and each one writes a Haiku about it. Even the maid who works for them. Now, such formalised sensitivity and appreciation of the moon in daily normal life is somehow missing from the world I've grown up in. And then there is Kawabata and his novels around tea ceremony, the game of Go, his little by the way references to the flowers in the room or the painting that has been put up specifically for a guest, or for the day. I don't know if any other aesthetic captures the transience of life, honours it, appreciates it so formally as theirs. The world view one has is then so different, perhaps humbler than the rigid go-getter, jet-setter western world view. This I feel.
Like many other books I'm reading at the moment, the female preoccupation or concern is good marriage, since that is the way of life for women in most of these times and places, in fact for most of history. Women have worked alongside men, but mostly in family settings, or domestic settings. Very little public exposure as such. Be it Palace Walk (which is one end of the spectrum), to the Russians, to the Germans ir to the Japanese and French (which have very clear formalised customs on women and their apt work).
Where do I stand on all this? I am grateful for the times I am born in, and that I get this opportunity - time and place to be a reader. I realise that born in a different time in the same place historically, it would have been well-nigh impossible. Be it man or woman. Any other place, any other time, still the chances are slim to the general population. Only these times of widespread education and access allow many things to many people which were never allowed or rather the correct word is accessible before. Appreciating this, is the first step I think. To not lose the perspective of how far we've come. Somehow I believe that the natural course and order of things is better than trying to push an order on things. All the science these days points towards this understanding of emergence, of emergent order - be it consciousness, be it time, or be it the human self. Systems allow an emergence. To let the nature emerge and settle into new forms rather than vehemently pushing an order because equality on it. The problem with saying this is, one is always an interested party and never objective, one couldn't say this if it were not the effort of people before us. And yet, pushing things or forcing things leads to worse outcomes, is what I feel. The way they say respect is earned. So it goes for some of these things as well, but then the question about opportunity itself, and there we enter the deep chaotic life and its questions- the social order we find ourselves in.
My personal view is still on appreciating the long arc of history, the perspective of how far we've come, and celebrating it rather than all the time talking about how unequal the world is, gender wise. The world is what the world is, first to see it well, and then without pressure from the popular, or the general, to solve and attend to what needs attending to. One begins with self, and then surrounds in gently outward radiating expanding circles. One does it for one's capacity and reach and all the while ensuring that one wears one's own mask. There's a lot to be done. The world can be a much better place. But it still evolves. One perhaps chooses better if one sees better, has some perspective and a grounded humility in the transience of things. Perhaps that is why we read, to teach ourselves to see better, to learn from the best out there, and then in little expanding circles to bring it to the world around us. How else does change emerge?
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More about the book itself once I finish it. I like it that it allows a slow pacing. And I very much like novels of a different time and place which ask you to imagine yourself in those contexts.
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Finished it 2nd half of November. Right along with the Brothers Karamazov.
