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I read this book shortly after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Both books cover similar ground: a man in the twilight of his years reflecting on his past. I was going to write a review about how the book deals with old age and coming to terms with our life, about how Kawabata writes luminous prose with each chapter a beautiful image fading into the next.

But then I read a comment by Ishiguro. He said he didn’t get Kawabata because he was too plotless, too Japanese. And this is something that I’ve been struggling with: whether it’s even possible to communicate across beliefs, time and cultures.

I confess I had problems with this book. It’s by no means an easy read for a reader more used to Western modes of narrative. Almost nothing seems to happen. And if it does, it is barely set off by an act of the protagonist, Shingo. We see him trying to deal with his children’s problem marriages, but resolution takes place outside of his involvement. At best, we see an unfolding of a quiet acceptance towards himself and the waning of his years. And this communicated not directly but through very Japanese-based allusions and imagery. I had to spend some time googling to even get a rough sense of what the novel was about.

In the end, I enjoyed it. But what did I enjoy or even understand? A friend of mine once remarked how much he enjoyed Brideshead Revisited and its coruscating criticism of the Church and religion. Waugh, I’m afraid, would have rolled in his grave. He was Catholic, devoutly so, and Brideshead Revisited was his encomium, paean even, to the loving embrace of the Bride of God. A Catholic friend, reading the same book, talked of how it aptly captured the strong Catholic belief in the need for self-sacrifice and self-denial. Words of anathema of course to the me-generation who see the depiction of self-denial as a trenchant put-down of religion’s repression rather than as the path to salvation.

It’s like listening to an Indian raga or Indonesian gamelan music. My ear hears only noise. I’d have to spend time training myself to understand it before I’d be able to appreciate it. So, I ask this, is it even possible to understand the art of another culture, without at least some work towards an immersion in that culture? And even then, are we seeing through a glass darkly, or worse, reading only a warped image of our own reflection?