Review: Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata 

Dandelions [1964/2017] – ★★★★

“Dandelions cover the banks of Ikuta River. They are an expression of the town’s character – Ikuta is like springtime, when the dandelions bloom. Three hundred and ninety four of its thirty five thousand residents are over eighty years old…Only one thing seems out of place in this town: the madhouse” [Kawabata/Emmerich, Penguin Classics, 1964/72/2019: 3].

These lines begin Yasunari Kawabata’s novel which is about a young woman, Ineko Kizaki, who suffers from a strange, rare illness called somagnosia (fictitious) – the inability to see the body of another person. Ineko is in the Ikuta mental institution, and much of the novel is the conversation that Ineko’s mother and Ineko’s lover Kuno have on the way from the clinic after visiting Ineko. They both try to decipher the strange illness plaguing their loved one, but even the best Japanese doctors cannot help them, and the only conclusion reached is that maybe Ineko’s illness may somehow be connected with her seeing a traumatic event involving her father when she was young. Kawabata’s last book is gentle and restrained, but hides penetrating insights into the matters of the heart and mind for a reader willing to read between the lines.

“That’s what’s been scaring me lately – the notion that something exists, but you can’t see it” [Kawabata/Emmerich, Penguin Classics, 1964/72/2019: 15]. The themes of this novel are seeing and imagining things that may not be there, failing to see what is clearly there, and drawing inferences about the nature of things from various, seeming remote and innocuous aspects of life. In that way, some of the story’s musing is about how the way a person strikes a bell (in a cloister) reveals things he holds dear to their heart, or fears. The sound of a bell functions as a key to uncover the meaning, truth or concern. Kawabata’s point seems to be that even our most mundane actions reveal something deep about us that we do not even suspect we reveal.

Similarly, each person’s act of seeing or failing to see something may be meaningful and says something about them or what they try to hide – “blindness [may] stem from some deep wound”. It certainly dictates a person’s own, unique reality, and what we see around us is also partly a reflection of our own state of mind or what we are interested in seeing. Kawabata places an emphasis on the fact that Ineko does not see obvious things, but her mother and Kuno also failed to see things on the way from the asylum: Kuno missed a big tree in the asylum which Ineko’s mother spotted, and in turn, the mother failed to see a white rabbit which Kuno swears he saw on the far bank. We all go through life being partially blind to some things, and seeing too clearly others, with the result being that we can never see the true reality, but only our own fragmented, selective one.

The author tries to uncover the nature of madness: “madness is more idiosyncratic than sanity; no single cure suits all patients”. In other words, we all sane in the same way, but people are mad in their own way (as how Tolstoy would have also put it). “After all, each of us carries inside of us the potential for madness”, says Ineko’s mother at some point, while Kuno later says: “we’re all struggling to contain the madness inside us” [Kawabata/Emmerich, Penguin Classics, 1964/72/2019: 26]. In some way, Dandelions may be not only Kawabata’s last novel, but his most personal one as Kawabata struggled with depression in the final stages of his life, and perhaps tried to make sense of his condition through this novel as well.

Kawabata also touches on Freudian theories to explain Ineko’s strange disease. Ikuta is described as a peaceful, beautiful town, but, clearly, it hides something disturbing: the madhouse, and, similarly, Ineko’s youth and beauty is contrasted with her terrifying, potentially dangerous disease, and with her traumatic past connected with the death of her father. Something happened inside Ineko when she witnessed her father’s tragic horse-riding accident, and her present condition may somehow be connected with that event. Also, as the most tranquil rivers are often the most tempestuous, Ineko’s relative calmness or desire not to voice certain things should not be taken as a sign of her improvement or peace of mind. Dandelion represents courage in Japan as it a flower that can grow anywhere, even among the weeds, and perhaps that is what Ineko requires to overcome her illness – courage to finally face the facts and come to terms with her own role in her father’s death.

🔔Translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich, Dandelions is as subtle and lyrical as Kawabata’s writing can be. It is a symbolism-driven, mystifying novel that by its end morphs into a gentle exploration of copying with trauma and overcoming grief.