Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata Read Free Book Online Page B

by the night. In spring people often mistook its bright red budding leaves for flowers, and wondered what kind of blossoms they were. The garden also had a rich cover of hair moss.
    “Suppose I make some of our new tea,” said Keiko. Otoko kept on gazing at her familiar garden, as if she were not used to seeing it at all hours. She was sitting there with her head slightly lowered, preoccupied, her eyes fixed on the moonlit half of the garden.
    When Keiko returned with the tea she mentioned reading somewhere that Rodin’s model for
The Kiss
was still alive, and around eighty years old. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”
    “That’s because you’re young! Must you die early if anartist immortalized your youth? It’s wrong to hunt out models like that!”
    Her outburst had come from being reminded of Oki’s novel. But Otoko, at thirty-nine, was beautiful. “Actually,” Keiko went on calmly, “it made me think of asking you to paint me once, while I’m young.”
    “Of course, if I could. But why not do a self-portrait?”
    “Me? I couldn’t get a good likeness, for one thing. Even if I did, all sorts of ugliness would come out, and I’d end up hating the picture. And still people would think I was flattering myself, unless I made it abstract.”
    “You mean you’d like a realistic one? But that’s out of character.”
    “I want
you
to paint me.”
    “I’d be happy to, if I could,” Otoko repeated.
    “Maybe your love has cooled—or are you afraid of me?” Keiko’s voice had an edge to it. “A man would be delighted to paint me. Even in the nude.”
    Otoko seemed unperturbed. “If that’s how you feel, suppose I try.”
    “I’m so glad!”
    “But a nude won’t do. A nude painted by a woman never turns out very well. Not in my old-fashioned style, anyway.”
    “When I paint my self-portrait I’ll include you in the picture,” said Keiko insinuatingly.
    “What kind of picture would that be?”
    Keiko giggled mysteriously. “Don’t worry. If you’regoing to paint me, mine can be abstract. No one will know.”
    “It’s not that I’m worried,” said Otoko, sipping the fragrant new tea.
    It was the first tea of the season, a gift from the tea plantation in Uji where Otoko had been going to sketch. None of the girls picking tea appeared in her sketches: the whole surface was filled with the soft undulations of overlapping rows of tea bushes. Day after day she returned to make more sketches, in various kinds of light and shadow. Keiko always went along with her.
    Once Keiko had asked: “Isn’t this an abstraction?”
    “If you had painted it, yes. I suppose it’ll be quite daring for me, all in green, but I want to try to harmonize the colors of the young and old leaves, and the soft, rounded wave patterns.”
    She had made a preliminary version of the painting in her studio, on the basis of all the sketches.
    But it was not merely from pleasure in the undulating waves of light and dark green that Otoko had wanted to paint the Uji tea plantation. After the breakup of her affair with Oki she had fled to Kyoto with her mother, and then gone back and forth several times to Tokyo, but what especially lingered in her mind from those days were the tea fields around Shizuoka, seen from the train window. Sometimes she saw them at midday, sometimes in the evening. She was still only a high-school student, and had no idea of becoming a painter; it was just that at the sight of the tea fields the sadness of parting suddenlypressed in on her. She could not say why these rather inconspicuous green slopes had so touched her heart, when along the railway line there were mountains, lakes, the sea—at times even clouds dyed in sentimental colors. But perhaps their melancholy green, and the melancholy evening shadows of the ridges across them, had brought on the pain. Then too, they were small, well-groomed slopes with deeply shaded ridges, not nature in the wild; and the rows of rounded tea bushes