Yasunari Kawabata remembers the death of an old friend

Driving home to Kanagawa on a night in summer after the war, his car leaves its ghost on the road and noses into the low pines circled blackly in the headlights. Yasunari lowers his window. In comes the new radio of the insects, along with the air that, this high up in the mountains, gives him the impression of being stretched taut across the loom of the woods. He sits with a wrist in each hand, feeling the air insist down his throat. Brought to rest, as the Americans say. Someone has built a small wooden shrine on the side of the road, and two of its red candles — already dead, for he’d seen no light — have been knocked to the ground which is pelted in dry needles.

At the mechanic’s in a small town, five towns distant from Kanagawa. Yasunari steps through a low door. As usual he has the feeling of other men quieting their laughter when he walks in. Something in his unsmiling stoop, the thinness of his wrists and neck, elicits a reluctant sobering in uneducated men. He is easily resented, like a schoolteacher in the prefectures of the rice harvest. The men in the shop shuttle efficiently underneath the chassis of his car. An empty carapace covered in small hungry beetles. He looks away.

There is a photo of him taken by his publisher. He is kneeling at his writing desk in a loose black robe looking down at his papers. The picture is taken at a distance. On all sides he is surrounded by shining mats of tatami, stretching out from him like a lake from an island. This picture gives him a strange feeling: he feels he isn’t in it at all, or like he is in it somewhere, but too small to make out.

His friend Mishima spoke often about this picture. This is how you seem to them, Kawabata. Like you’re carrying around a moat of tatami. Like even after years, they remain on the bare wood at the edges, balancing on one foot to remove their shoe.