42 pages • 1 hour read
Yasunari KawabataThousand Cranes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5: “Double Star”
Part 5, Chapter 1 Summary
Kikuji returns home from a trip and rests in a darkened room where he is visited by Chikako. She informs him that, during his absence, both Yukiko and Fumiko got married to other men. Kikuji is shocked, although he tries to hide his reaction from Chikako. Chikako seems displeased with him for defying her matchmaking plans, and through their discussion, Kikuji gleans that she has lost interest in maintaining a connection with him. She tells him about a recent trip to Kyoto and the collector of tea ware with whom she met there. As a farewell gesture in memory of his father, she plans to sell off Kikuji’s entire inherited collection of tea ware for him before washing her hands of him. Kikuji approves of the idea and mentions that he’d like to sell his house and the tea cottage similarly.
Part 5, Chapter 2 Summary
Fumiko phones Kikuji about a personal letter that she recently sent to him that has not yet arrived. Kikuji congratulates her on her marriage, which shocks her, since she remains decidedly unmarried. She has just recently moved into a little room of her own and found a job. She agrees to come to his house to discuss the matter, and upon arriving, she says that Chikako was lying. Fumiko seems both surprised and hurt that Kikuji believed the lie. When the letter that she previously mentioned arrives, she refuses to let Kikuji read it and rips it up.
Part 5, Chapter 3 Summary
Fumiko previously gave Kikuji the Shino tea bowl that used to belong to her mother, but she now regrets it. She tries to persuade Kikuji to destroy it because it is inferior to the Shino water jug and one should only give the very best pieces as gifts. Kikuji doesn’t want to destroy it and agrees to get out one of his father’s tea bowls; he says that he will only smash the Shino tea bowl if it is obviously the inferior of the two pieces.
When the two bowls are side by side, Kikuji realizes that they are a husband-wife pair. It is probable that during their relationship, Kikuji’s father and Mrs. Ota each drank from these cups. Kikuji and Fumiko try to share a tea ceremony using their parents’ cups, but Fumiko finds herself unable to prepare the matcha. She claims that her mother won’t let her.
Part 5, Chapter 4 Summary
The chapter opens early the following morning with Kikuji in his garden collecting together the pieces of the Shino tea bowl that Fumiko smashed the night before. He wraps the shards of the bowl and sets them aside, watching the morning star and reflecting on his feelings for Fumiko. He now believes that she is without comparison and no longer sees her as a proxy for her mother since he cares for her in her own right.
Hoping to meet with her, Kikuji tries to contact Fumiko at her work, but she’s absent. He visits her residence, but she isn’t there, and the landlady’s daughter says that Fumiko has left on a trip. Kikuji is overcome with a foreboding that Fumiko may have followed in her mother’s footsteps and died by suicide.
Part 5 Analysis
In Part 5, Chapter 1, Chikako again visits Kikuji at his home, coming to him in darkness that echoes his own dark thoughts and the ugliness of Chikako’s personality, contributing to the theme of The Juxtaposition of Beauty and Ugliness. She appears to have given up on manipulating Kikuji into schemes of her own making. Instead, she seeks to punish him for his defiance by making him believe that he has lost his chance with both Yukiko and Fumiko. The fact that Kikuji, upon discovering that Fumiko is in fact still unattached, doesn’t care of check whether Chikako was also lying about Yukiko shows the extent to which his romantic feelings have become focused on Fumiko. While Yukiko was a significant presence in the early chapters of the novel, she now fades away from the narrative, and Fumiko is the only secondary character in Part 5, Chapters 2-4.
Kikuji shares a tea ceremony in the cottage with Fumiko as he once did with her mother, with the same implied conclusion of their sleeping together. Again, Fumiko and Kikuji try to reenact their parents’ relationship by sharing a tea ceremony out of the husband-wife cups that they used, but this time they are unsuccessful. The legacy of Mrs. Ota prevents Fumiko from finishing the tea preparations. Fumiko breaks the tea bowl, representing a liberation from her mother’s legacy. This is a decisive climax to Kawabata’s exploration of the theme of Legacy: Imperfect Transmission and Inevitability. By the time Kikuji realizes the extent of his feelings for Fumiko, it is already too late. Neither the reader nor Kikuji are to know whether she leaves to kill herself or to free herself from the cycle of dysfunctional relationships.
The conclusion of the final part of the novel is summarized in Kikuji’s final words: “And only Kurimoto is left” (78). Although she claims that she plans to wash her hands of Kikuji, Kurimoto Chikako is the only secondary character still remaining in Kikuji’s life at the end of the novel. Everyone else is consigned to memory, a conclusion to the theme of the Decay of Traditions and Values. She is the only one of his father’s generation still alive. The tea traditions are in precarious hands, since her final act is to sell Kikuji’s collection of tea ware, representing the imposition of Western capitalist values on Japanese traditions during this period. The final statement suggests that past traditions and values have decayed until only the worst of them persist.
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By Yasunari Kawabata
