Beauty and Sadness Read Online Free PDF

gave no interviews on the subject. Even when the novel first appeared Oki heard nothing from her or her mother about it.
    The trouble had occurred in his own household. That was to be expected. Before their marriage Fumiko was a typist at a news agency, and so Oki had had his young bride type up all his writings. It was something of a lovers’ game, the sweet togetherness of newlyweds, butthere was more to it than that. When his work first appeared in a magazine he was astonished at the difference in effect between a pen-written manuscript and the tiny characters in print. However, as he became more experienced he began to anticipate the effect of his words on the printed page. Not that he wrote with that in mind, he never gave it a thought, but the gap between manuscript and published work disappeared. He had learned how to write for print. Even passages that seemed tedious or loose in manuscript would turn out to be tightly written. Perhaps that meant that he had learned his craft. He often told beginning novelists: “Get something in print, in a little magazine or anywhere. It’s very different from manuscript—you’ll be surprised how much you learn.”
    The present-day form of publication was printing in type. But he had had the opposite kind of surprise too. For example, he had always read
The Tale of Genji
in the small type of modern editions, but when he came across it in a handsome old block-printed edition it made an entirely different impression on him. What had it been like when they read it in those beautiful flowing manuscripts of the age of the Heian Court? A thousand years ago
The Tale of Genji
was a modern novel. It could never be read that way again, no matter how far
Genji
studies progressed. Still, the old edition gave a more intense pleasure than a modern one. Doubtless the same would be true of Heian poetry. As for later literature, Oki had tried reading Saikaku in facsimiles of the seventeenth-century block-print editions, not out of antiquarianismbut because he wanted to come as close as he could to the original work. But to read contemporary novels in manuscript facsimile was sheer dilettantism; they were meant to be read in type print, not in a boring handwriting.
    By the time he married Fumiko there was no longer any serious gap between his manuscripts and the printed versions, but since his wife was a typist he had her type them up for him. Typewritten manuscripts in Japanese were far closer to printing than handwritten ones. Then too, he knew that almost all Western manuscripts were either produced on the typewriter or typed up in clean copies. But the typescripts of Oki’s novels, partly because he was not used to them, seemed colder and flatter than either the pen manuscripts or the final printed versions. Yet for that reason he could recognize their defects, and found it easier to make corrections and revisions. And so it had become customary for Fumiko to type up all his manuscripts.
    Hence the problem of what to do with the manuscript of
A Girl of Sixteen.
To have Fumiko type it would be to cause her pain and humiliation. It would be cruel. When he met Otoko his wife was twenty-two and had just given birth to their son. Of course she suspected her husband’s love affair. She would go out at night, carrying the baby on her back, and wander along the railroad tracks. Once, after she was gone for several hours, he discovered her in the garden leaning on the old plum tree, unwilling to return to the house. He had been out looking for her, and heard her sobbing as he came in the gate.
    “What on earth are you doing? You’ll make the baby catch cold.”
    It was mid-March, and still quite chilly. The baby did catch cold. It was hospitalized with a touch of pneumonia. Fumiko stayed at the hospital to look after it.
    “It’ll be convenient for you if he dies,” she would say to him. “Then you’ll have no trouble leaving me.” Even so, Oki took advantage of his wife’s absence to go to