The Kyoto Ordeal (Tales of the Other Universe Book 1)

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Months later, our invitation is finally granted. We collect the woman from the temple, along with a young man in a baggy jumper she introduces as her friend, then drive out of Kyoto. I had imagined more of a pilgrimage, hiking up some steep mountain path to a temple high in the clouds. We get out of the car beside a garage filled with pots of paint and planks of wood.

A beefy man in a tracksuit opens the door. This is the monk. We follow him across a small courtyard. He shows me how I can get my own prayer included in the ritual. Along one wall is a list of all the prayers you can make, from success in exams, or a job promotion, to simply your dreams coming true. I opt for the prayer of good health for my family. The man in the tracksuit returns, now wearing the white robes of a priest. He climbs up and settles himself cross-legged on the table, and starts chanting.

He stands up and says something matter-of-factly in Japanese, as though he has just come into the room to find us sitting there. I need to fire a deep, perceptive question at him, to win him over with my understanding of running and the path to spiritual enlightenment.

In answer, he starts explaining the whole process of the 1,day training. Along the way, each day you need to stop at over shrines and temples. The running is really just a way to get from one to the other. And it is not even running. Much of the time you are walking.

What I learned when I met the monk who ran 1,000 marathons

It is a type of meditation through movement. It is a time to meditate on life, on how you should live. I want to know what reaching enlightenment actually feels like. The 1,day challenge is not an end point, the challenge is to continue, enjoying life and learning new things. These monks are purportedly some of the wisest, most spiritual men on earth, with insight gained through incredible feats of endurance.

I've This is gonna get hypothetical because there are film versions of Beauty and Sadness: I've been leaning towards photosenthesis style! I'm a vegetable and in my coma I'm living all these other lives! So I think despite that there are films of this! Hypothetical 'cause these movies may not do any of the things I'm about to suggest that maybe I would have felt less studio egos pushing in how they say it went down and more home movie if this had been a movie with actors for me to attach myself to emotionally.

I know, I'm contradicting what I said about why I might've turned more to books these days.

Why we love to run

But damn, some of the major players in Beauty and Sadness were TOO idealized and I got impatient and wish they'd stop insisting it was all so fucking pure. If it were a movie I could have watched someone and thought, "Wow, she looks really sad.

I feel really bad for her. Oki immortalizes their young love they love as teenagers do. As only teenagers do? I don't know if I believe that. More on that later! Both feel forever young by its everlasting at least in the twenty years they've been apart popularity. I didn't see what the big deal was about Oki. He's just a middle aged guy who feels he lost something that had ended.

Where was the backbone? The weakened knees and hearts of fire weakened hearts of fire. Oki was really just the bland old man. He wouldn't catch my eye, I'm pretty certain.

I don't know if I believed it was ever as great as either one of them imagines it to be. Okoto is a painter. Yeah, self obsessed artist types.

It must've been great to see each other reflected back in each other's eyes? So the teenager thing I said I would get to later. If it's the first time it can't feel comparable to other things, sure. Oki maybe wanted to feel young by being with the teenaged girl. I didn't get the sense that either one of them wanted to still be together, as older people. Okoto was not tied to any one else her mother is totally different thing altogether , free to force herself, not carefree but destructively free, into these highly romanticized interludes.

Oki would love having a new life than his old one. What else did he have to lose? Teenagers do seem to have that free of the future airs. I'm not arguing my case at all, am I? Oki wasn't a teenager. Okoto loses their baby when she is sixteen. She tries to kill herself. Her mother puts her in an institution for a while the right thing to do and then they move to Kyoto to get away from Oki's memory. Oki never comes for her. He writes a novel about it. Okoto paints pictures of the unborn baby. She's a lot of whatifs and idealizations that I couldn't see in my mind Where are the eyes for ME to see reflections in?

Descriptions of paintings and novels were not doing it for me. After years of being all alone, Okoto makes a name for herself as an artist I tried to find online the trick photograph of the geisha that may or may not be two geisha that inspires her painting. Troubled namelessly so Keiko is her student and lover. Keiko is Kawabata's loved extraordinarily beautiful young woman. An actress portraying her in a movie would have much to work with as far as changeability goes but towards what? I don't know if I believe in it.

However, too much wouldn't be a good thing. I wish so much that Keiko had taken shape more apart from the memories of the adults. She claims to want revenge, she says she's jealous a whole lot. If I could have seen it instead of having it described to me. I'm not some blind dude on a date with a woman describing sunsets to him. I know I can. It was kinda interesting how Fumiko, Oki's jealous wife, receded into the background of her own life after the novel was published. Oki is such a cold bastard he has her type his manuscript of his affair with the teenager for him!

She miscarries, apparently because of this trauma. After the public receives the novel with love and affection she herself is hardly a spot in the corner of its eye , she sort of accepts what happened because it was written about. What the fuck is with these people going over what happened until it becomes some unshakeable myth? Couldn't someone have done something?

Fumiko could have left her husband. Oki could have left his wife. Okoto could have gone to a real hospital in the first place so she wouldn't lose her baby just because her married lover was ashamed of her. Mom could've left her crazy daughter in the hospital. They do all this shit because they believed too much in that damned teenaged feeling. Oh yeah, I was saying that I liked how the wife playing into that flicked the switch more on what they were doing than any of that navel gazing or nutty revenge schemes ever did.

Oh yeah, I wanted to say that it wasn't pure because it was first and stopped all else in its tracks. That pretty much makes it impure. What good is it then? It's blockage like a hard to pass turd. I guess total immersion in books isn't good when there are wrong things like teenagers I want to ignore.

Let's go to the movies. Escribir sobre literatura japonesa siempre me ha parecido un reto.

Preso del recuerdo, Oki desea volver a verla, a pesar de que es casado y tiene dos hijos. Feb 24, Gorkem rated it it was amazing Shelves: A Classical Kawabata's Tale Writing a comment for such a masterpiece is one of the hardest moments that I've ever had. From beginning to the end, Mr. Kawabata reveals an incredible environment among individuals and pushes reader to contemplate to what extend obscurity and complexity can endure among people.

The layers of novel psychologically sets very intense themes such as love, revenge, acceptance by society and manipulation with Mr. I really feel that before wri A Classical Kawabata's Tale Writing a comment for such a masterpiece is one of the hardest moments that I've ever had. I really feel that before writing a detailed comment, this book needs to rest in my thoughts.

All in all, this is a great book which compares cultural issues and puts very uncomfortable reflection and reading experience for western reader. View all 4 comments.

Oct 09, Revel Atkinson rated it it was amazing. I sometimes wonder how I manage to avoid living under a blanket of sadness myself. Is the past not fuller than the future? Does it pose more of a threat to loneliness or is it the cause? Oki, who is roughly thirty years older than I, and Otoko, I sometimes wonder how I manage to avoid living under a blanket of sadness myself.

Oki, who is roughly thirty years older than I, and Otoko, who is thirty-six, appear to understand love from a brief episode in their pasts, when he was thirty and she was only sixteen, and they both were in love with each other; this moment cannot be replicated and proves irreplaceable in the course of the novel.

It was the time when Oki and Otoko were together, young and perhaps innocent in their way that the sensation of love was most brilliant. It is from this relatively short time together—when they experienced their purest sense of passion—that all other love is measured, that love is even understood.

While Oki and Otoko went their separate ways, their sense of love is perfectly preserved in the past. There is no choice at all, no choosing to be done. Jul 21, J. Watson aka umberto rated it liked it Shelves: While reading the following nine chapters: Noted as a young sorceress p. My point is that her revenge should include only Oki himself. Interestingly, Kawabata's style and plot are something so wonderful, unique and superb that, I think, few other Japanese authors can surpass him. It is truly a marvel to read. Compared to his other novels, "Beauty and Sadness" has obviously and bravely been written to reveal his in-depth literary stature as one of the great novelists since he was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in literature in I also wondered what the title meant and how 'Beauty' and 'Sadness' related; indeed, I by chance found them mentioned in a line as part of Keiko and Oki's following dialogs: But how long will beauty last?

A woman feels sad to think of that. Consequently, all things experienced and done by means of nostalgic and sentimental love of all key characters involved as if dictated by fate and karma; therefore, such beauty does not necessarily imply bliss, happiness or success, rather it definitely could end up with sadness as we can read from this novel and see in the daily life. One of Kawabata's styles, I noticed, is that he sometimes employs quietude amid ensuing dialogs as if to subdue such ongoing movement as we can see and sense from these excerpts: I enjoyed reading this novel by Kawabata due to, I think, my familiarity with his writing style especially his brief descriptions and lively dialogs as communicated by key characters.

Indeed, this fantastic novel should deserve a little more in its five-star scale, that is, 3. I mean they're all right if you need something to read, reflect and apply. I admired his realistic narrations concerning the romantic relationships between Oki and Otoko, Oki and Keiko, and Taichiro and Keiko. He has his subtle ways in writing them for his readers to appreciate and we can't help wondering how he can do it brilliantly. It's his genius and I'm sure I should enjoy reading it more if I knew Japanese. Everyone's busy working and has no time to read its review from such an unknown amateur GR critic like me, therefore, I'd say something briefly about Keiko, as a protegee having stayed with Otoko till, according to Oki's wife, Fumiko "She was almost frighteningly pretty" p.

Interestingly, the name of Oki's lover is Miss Otoko Ueno; her surname reminds me of a place named 'Ueno' during our going sightseeing to see Mt. Does this name 'Ueno' have its special meaning? I wonder if this 'Ueno' has something special till Kawabata's adopted it as his key female character. Find a copy and enjoy! View all 23 comments. Uprkos divnom romanu, pod utiskom sam pogovora i prevoda koji je toliko nakaradan i rogobatan da ne mogu da verujem da je u pitanju osoba toliko hvaljena u oblasti japanologije.

Sep 10, Toby rated it liked it Shelves: Kawabata's Nobel Prize winning novel of love, sex, and revenge, memory, growing old, and obsession. This one wa Kawabata's Nobel Prize winning novel of love, sex, and revenge, memory, growing old, and obsession. This one wavers between that typical Kawabata style and something of a Hitchcockian drama, drifting from the aching longing of one character to the almost schizophrenic mood swings of another via the damaged memories of a third and it is this conflict of styles and tone and character that disappointed me the most.

Kawabata shows his hand too early and too easily making the journey to the inevitable just a little too perfunctory. There's still a lot to enjoy, a lot of wonderfully evocative passages but the inevitable nature of things actually seemed to hide from the reader of some of the beauty and sadness you might otherwise have felt. The worst thing is being sick of life. I ordered three of his works, and settled on Beauty and Sadness as a first encounter—largely, admittedly, due to its intriguing and sublime title.

The story centers on a love affair between a fifteen-year-old girl Otoko and a married-with-child Taichiro thirty-year-old man Oki. Oki later "I'm not afraid of suicide. Oki later becomes a writer, immortalizing the love affair in what remains, despite subsequent others, his best-selling novel.

See a Problem?

Otoko, who becomes pregnant but loses her child, tries but fails to commit suicide, and subsequently is moved by her mother away from Tokyo to Kyoto. The events transpire some twenty years after the love affair, and revolve around that ordeal and how it affected and continues to affect those involved Otoko and Keiko, Oki and his wife Fumiko, and their son Taichiro. The writing is beautiful—Kawabata has a keen sense for conveying mood, and his style is both precise and wonderfully understated.

However, for all the purported depth of the subject matter of Beauty and Sadness , parts of it struck me as a little superficial—as much as I wanted to avoid that feeling. I also cannot say I appreciated each aspect of the story equally; some parts were better than others. Overall, then, the work was slightly uneven, even though it holds enough to be worth reading the story does stick, and the style really is admirable.

I look forward to reading Kawabata's other works. Otoko's mother is the quiet hero of the story. Jun 06, Hadrian rated it really liked it Shelves: A bleak and beautiful and tragic novel, slowly unwinding and unraveling love, lust, beauty, and revenge. Kawabata earns his Nobel many times over. Oct 02, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: A bit of a shocker.

I remembered "Snow Country" as being about old people and snow. This is crammed with sizzling lesbians. There's beauty and sadness in spades, but he's also left lots of room for some very bad romance. I think I'm right to say that this has my first Japanese-fiction daytime outdoors sex scene. This was obviously written by a man, and you probably don't want to read it if you are serious about your lesbianism. Another, my fourth, novel from Kawabata.

But this one is very different from the other three. Beauty and Sadness is a novel of love and betrayal, vengeance and deceit. Unlike the other books, the story moves steadily towards an end that is not always apparent. Fallout is Now Available! The book is now available on CreateSpace here and will be on Amazon in a few days. A Long Awaited Update. Part of this has been because I was focused on other priorities in my life like working, getting in shape, and other personal projects. This one is not related to the Other Universe series and is targeted for an older crowd than the other books.

Halcyon Days 10 and Finale. While I must say this summer was much more pleasant than last year, I feel like I barely got to enjoy it. I guess the older you get, the more those pleasant days seem harder to hold on to. I hope that for you, dear reader, that summer will hold out as long as it can. The last two stories are tied together and deal with the end of summer. The mornings have reminded me of fall, but they give way to an intense afternoon heat.

All the same, the last story will be posted in early September. Anyway, there are two more stories left after this to round off the end of summer, so maybe it will be better to let them stretch out into September. I enjoyed a nice vacation with four full days of sun last week which so far have been followed up by rain and clouds every day since.

I suggest reading it on a tablet or something outside when the weather turns. Halcyon Days 5 and 6. I was hoping to time the seasons with the seasons in the stories, so now things should be synced up what with summer in full swing here. The new stories, along with all of the others, can be found in the Halcyon Days section of the Short Stories page. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price:

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