The Sufferings of Female Characters in 'Beauty and Sadness' Ashley Habenicht 12th Grade

Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Beauty and Sadness focuses mainly around Oki, a man in his fifties, attempting to rekindle his love with thirty-year-old Otoko, his lover fifteen years prior. Otoko is now a painter, and she herself has a sixteen-year-old female lover named Keiko. Throughout the novel, the reader learns more about Oki and Otoko’s love affair and the effect it had on Oki’s wife Fumiko all while Taichiro, Oki’s son, begins his own love affair with Keiko. In Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Beauty and Sadness, these women are treated as objects for men to toy around with. Each woman in the novel is used and wounded emotionally by the men in the novel.

Fumiko, Oki’s wife, is unaware of Oki’s affair with Otoko until later on. She has already had a son, named Taichiro, and when discovering Oki’s affair, she becomes angry and often she is away from the house with her son, but “[e]ven so, Oki took advantage of his wife’s absence to go meet Otoko” (Kawabata 412). Fumiko is Oki’s wife, but he does not treat her as one. Marriage is meant to be equal, but Oki takes advantage of her and her absence due to finding out about his affair just to continue his affair. She is also treated as an object. Literally, Fumiko is Oki’s typewriter,...