WEAKER VESSEL

There was a curio shop on a commercial street intersection. A porcelain image of the Kannon stood between the shop and the street. It had the stature of a twelve-year-old girl. When trolley cars passed by, the cold skin of the Kannon would quiver in company with the glass-paneled door of the shop. Every time I passed by that image, I was afflicted with a mild concern that it might topple over onto the street.…Hence my dream.

The body of the Kannon keeled over straight at me.

  It abruptly, eerily extended its long, abundantly-drooping, white arms and threw them around my neck.
  I leaped back, startled at the creepy way in which the arms alone took on life and at the cold feel of the porcelain skin.
  Without a sound, the Kannon image lay in pieces in the street.
  Then she was there picking up the pieces.
  She crouched low, busily absorbed in gathering up the porcelain fragments which, gleaming, were scattered about.
  Astonished to see her there, I was trying to open my mouth to offer an excuse when I found myself wide awake.
  The whole affair, beginning with the toppling of the Kannon, seemed to have been but a moment.

I tried to fix a meaning to the dream.

  “…unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel…”
  These words from the Bible often drifted through my mind those days. I always associated the words “weaker vessel” with a porcelain bowl. And with my girl.
  Young girls truly are fragile. Just falling in love, in a sense, is a shattering experience for a young woman. That is how I had been thinking.
  …Then in my dream perhaps my girl was busily absorbed in gathering up the broken pieces of herself?

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Written by Kawabata Yasunari 1924

Translated in Bloomington, Indiana by P. Metevelis 1978

Edited 1981