Beauty and Sadness

Beauty and Sadness is a 1964 novel by Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature and the first Japanese author to receive that honor. The last novel written by Kawabata before his dead by suicide in 1972, Beauty and Sadness follows aging novelist Oki Toshio as he attempts to reconnect with a former mistress, Otoko Ueno, whom he seduced when she was just fifteen.

The novel opens as famous novelist Oki Toshio travels from his home in Tokyo to Kyoto. He has developed a sentimental hankering to hear the city’s temple bells ring in the New Year alongside his former mistress Otoko. They have not been in touch for more than twenty years, but Oki recently glimpsed a picture of her in a magazine article about her work: she is a successful painter. He wants to see if she has retained the quality of innocence that first attracted him to her when he was in his twenties and she was a schoolgirl of fifteen. “Though she had remained unmarried, it was quite possible that she would refuse to see an old lover.”

Oki is not just an old lover, however. Their affair ended badly when Otoko became pregnant. Oki abandoned her, the baby died, and Otoko was committed to a mental hospital: “Had not Otoko's mother, and even Oki himself, secretly hoped the child would never see the light of day? Otoko had given birth in a dingy little clinic on the outskirts of Tokyo. Oki felt a sharp pang at the thought that the baby's life might have been saved if it had been cared for in a good hospital.”



Nevertheless, she does not refuse to see him. Neither does she meet him at once. Instead, she sends her beautiful nineteen-year-old protégée and lover, Keiko Sakami, to greet him. Oki is excited and disturbed by their relationship: “Even if she had been led into her infatuation with her pupil Keiko, so much younger and of her own sex, was that not another form of infatuation with herself?... Had Otoko not wanted to create a pure, lovely image of herself? Apparently the girl of sixteen who loved Oki would always exist within her, never to grow up. Yet she had been unaware of it.”

Otoko and Oki discuss Oki’s most famous novel, A Girl of Sixteen, which is based upon their affair. Otoko recognizes herself in the novel, but she accuses Oki of leaving out the psychological suffering which for her was the main experience of their relationship. The novel is sentimentalized.

It becomes clear that Keiko—who, naturally, has read A Girl of Sixteen—is fanatically jealous of Oki and the power the older man still has over her mentor and lover. Keiko pledges to exact revenge for Otoko’s suffering from Oki and his family.



Oki returns home to his wife and his son, Taichiro. Oki’s wife has already suffered; they were already married during Oki’s affair with Otoko. On top of that, Oki’s wife typed his novels for him: “It was something of a lover's game, the sweet togetherness of newlyweds.” She wept as she typed A Girl of Sixteen, and her sadness caused her to miscarry their first child.

Keiko sends Oki two of her paintings. Oki contacts her, and Keiko sets about seducing him. As they have sex, Keiko cries out Otoko’s name.

When Keiko returns to Otoko, she tells her lover what she has done, confessing that she felt jealous of Otoko’s continuing love for Oki. Otoko asks whether she shouldn’t be jealous herself. Neither woman is willing to answer the question. Their relationship becomes increasingly troubled, with Keiko apparently trying to inflict emotional pain on the older woman.



Unsatisfied with her revenge, Keiko seduces Taichiro, not only sexually but also romantically. She even persuades him to convince his mother that he is going to marry Keiko. However, Taichiro becomes suspicious, questioning Keiko’s motives for being with him. She admits that she is jealous “because Miss Ueno still loves your father…because she doesn’t bear the least grudge toward him.”

Keiko’s desire for revenge continues to burn strongly. The novel ends with a report of a boating accident. Keiko has taken Tacihiro out on a boat, apparently with the intention of drowning him. The report is ambiguous, but it is suggested that Keiko, too, has drowned.

Beauty and Sadness explores the cost of art, to both artists and their families. The novel also considers the value of love, attachment, and jealousy, as well as the nature of beauty, both sexual and artistic. Although Beauty and Sadness is not ranked by most critics alongside Kawabata’s masterpieces Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, it is nevertheless recognized as the work of a great novelist, “distinguished by purity, supreme clarity of line and sustained elegiac tone” (New York Times).