Portrayal of Love as a Sickness in Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness

Love aRole of Love as a Sickness in Beauty and Sadness The poet Samuel Daniel said in one of his poems that “love is a sickness full of woes, all remedies refusing” (Page 111). The novel Beauty and Sadness by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata tells the story of a destructive love affair between a married writer and a teenage girl. This love affair continues to haunt both of these characters more than twenty years after their last encounter. In this novel there is the recurrent theme of the role of love as a sickness. Throughout the novel there are many instances where the love shared between two people have deleterious effects on both the characters involved and those surrounding them. The lingering bitterness due to this love affair poisons everyone around them. Examples of the role of love as a sickness can be seen in Beauty and Sadness with the following characters: the love between Keiko and Otoko, the love between Oki and Fumiko, the “love” between Keiko and Taichiro, and most importantly the love between Oki and Otoko. The love affair central to the plot and theme of this novel is between the two characters Oki and Otoko. Oki is a married author with a child that begins to have a passionate love affair at thirty years old with Otoko, who is fifteen years old at the time. Despite being married and a father, Oki falls in love with Otoko. Otoko had also fallen in love with Oki, but when she became pregnant and their child died at birth their affair came to an end. Despite their affair coming to an end, the love these two characters shared once never withers and stays in the hearts of both of these lovers causing continuing bitterness and sadness.
This bitterness and sadness not only affects Oki and Otoko, it affects Oki’s son Taichiro, Otoko’s pupil/lover Keiko, and Oki’s wife Fumiko. Oki and Otoko both live their entire life regretting what happened in the past. Otoko never finds another man and Oki keeps longing for the passionate love he