The Master of Funerals - Yasunari Kawabata

Rating: ★★★★
07/12/15

Since I was a boy, I have had neither my own house nor home.

A gloomy mist is surrounding the entire room. A rush of silent reflections, nostalgic sighs and unheard questions join the inevitable melody that reality constantly plays.

Relatives, acquaintances, strangers. One. Two. Countless funerals.

Memories untold. Restrained emotions in black and white mourning clothes.

Life leaves a trace in his retina, one that inexorably blurs as time goes by.

One. Two. Countless lives. The feeling that I was all alone.

Naturally.

...funerals often inspired me to consider the lives and the deaths of people who were close to me. And, in the repose of contemplation, my heart grew still.

So it was that as a youth, my decorous behavior at the funerals of strangers was never feigned; rather, it was a manifestation of the capacity for sadness I had within me.

They made him the master of funerals.

And it all ends with a joke.

An eerie duality that pays tribute to the multiple dichotomies of existence. Frightening thoughts are depicted with the melancholic beauty of Kawabata's prose. It makes you wonder whether you are there, reading in your dimly lit room or in one of his visions.