Review of The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata

*The Rainbow* by Yasunari Kawabata (1951). Published by Voyage.

As someone who reads an insane amount of books in a year, I spend a lot of time at my local library and simply online doing a lot of research. I’ve been actively trying to diversify the books I read in a plethora of ways: while I do primarily read BIPOC/POC literature most of the time, I noticed most of my books were contemporary.

While I’m all about championing living writers and playwrights in almost everything I do, I do want to read some more older books to understand how we got to this point in literature. Especially when it comes to older Asian/African/Latinx literature—I need to know the building blocks of the movements we now see today.

So thus I’ve been spending more time thinking about what I’m reading in the free time I do have. That said, I was wandering my library when I noticed a copy of The Rainbow placed at the corner of the book display. I saw it was a Japanese author, and when I read the synopsis and realized it was published after the war, I knew I wanted to read it.

Postwar Japan has become a more prominent research interest of mine, especially as I did a master’s thesis on Korean women in the colonial period and the period immediately after it. Zainichi literature is harder to source if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but this is a very Japanese novel I picked up right here.

It’s not a tough read at all, so I got through it in a day and a half. Here’s my review before I start rambling too much!

The story of two half-sisters in a wealthy household as Japan rebuilds itself after the war.

This is a novel that focuses on two main characters, but were born of the same father. They are the half-sisters Asako and Momoko. They have two different mothers as their father, a prominent and wealthy architect named Mizuhara, had children with three different women.

They have their coming of age in the years immediately after World War II, which is when the story and novel picks up at. Momoko is the eldest of the three children, but she has a serious trauma that she needs to overcome. During the war, her beloved boyfriend became a kamikaze.

As one could guess from that label alone, he didn’t make it back home to Japan. Momoko spends the course of the novel trying to grapple with the implications of this loss, and she engages in a series of relationships that aren’t really healthy. It also didn’t help for her that the last days of their relationship weren’t pretty either—it’s kind of ugly to read about, so brace yourself if you haven’t already.

The other protagonist is Asako, who is the youngest sister. She’s the exact opposite of her sister, and could even serve as a foil for her haunted half-sister. She’s just come of age and falls in love with a man for the first time. Suddenly the world is being seen with rose colored glasses, but there are other problems coming to the surface.

These two women are clearly growing up in a wealthy environment from the descriptions of their day to day life, but there are always the shadows of the war, as this novel takes place so soon after it. Although they have money to shelter them from the brunt of the war’s ugly impacts stretching out in Japan, they’re not immune to what’s going on.

At the same time, they’re kind of in the shadows of their mothers in the family. Their family is essentially fracturing and falling apart throughout the course of the novel, although Asako, who is still childish and naive in several senses, is trying to keep them all together in different ways.

In Momoko’s story, too, we get a sense of feminism in the modern sense. She’s not a typical girl from her era, and the fact she’s engaging with men the way she does also offers a different glimpse into how Japan is changing. Her mother, who Mizuhara did not continue his relationship, also decided not to remarry. That’s pretty uncommon too for the period.

Overall Thoughts

While I found the two sisters to be very interesting people, I didn’t care a ton for the novel itself. What I found most compelling about the novel is how it depicted upper class life during this time, as I had mainly consumed narratives from the opposite side of Japanese society in the early 1950s.

I do wonder what this would have looked like if a woman had wrote it. I can’t help but to think of this often, and I want to dive deeper into these narratives by women in Japan in the near future.

That said, this is a good novel. The writing itself flows quite well, and it quite lyrical. It also isn’t a mountain of pages to get through, and I found, despite taking a break to do other things in between, that one could finish this in one sitting if they were determined to.

Go pick this one up if you’re interested in Japanese literature I’d say, or even find the synopsis compelling. I wish we could have more women authors from this decade that I could read stories from, so if anyone knows any suggestions in translation, I would love you to the moon and back. For now, I’m fine with reading Kawabata.

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