Kinshu: Autumn Brocade

Aki visits Zao to show the starlit sky to her handicapped son, and by chance she runs into her ex‑husband on the gondola. His worn, haggard appearance shocks her. Upset and confused, she exchanges only a few brief words with him.

Two months later, Aki manages to find his address and writes him a letter. This becomes the beginning of their renewed correspondence.

Aki was the only daughter of a father who owned a large construction company. She and Yasuaki had been classmates in college, and after graduation they married. Yasuaki was expected to become her father’s successor. But a year later, he became involved in a double‑suicide attempt at an inn in Kyoto. The woman, Yukako—his classmate from junior high school—died, and he survived. After the incident, he was deemed unfit to inherit the company, and the couple divorced with hardly a word between them.

Aki remarried, but her second marriage brought little happiness. Her son was born with physical and intellectual disabilities, and her new husband had an affair. Aki had loved Yasuaki deeply. She resented him, blaming all her misfortunes on his actions. Yet Yasuaki, too, had suffered after the divorce. His business ventures failed, and he lost hope.

Partings between a man and a woman who once loved each other are often painful. The wounds do not heal easily. Aki writes to Yasuaki in search of meaning—of her life, of their past, of the choices that shaped them. Their correspondence continues for about a year. Through their letters, they confront their shared history with honesty and gradually come to understand one another. After a year, each begins a new life, separately but with a sense of quiet resolution.

The novel is written in an epistolary form, interwoven with Mozart’s music and a Buddhist sensibility. Aki’s words—“living and dying are the same thing”—recall the Heart Sutra, the most widely known Buddhist scripture in Japan:

form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form;
emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form,
the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.
.......
all dharmas are marked with emptiness;
they are not produced or stopped, not defiled or immaculate, not deficient or complete.


I usually read English literature, so this time I wanted to read a Japanese novel rich in emotion. I knew almost nothing about Teru Miyamoto at first—not even whether the author was a man or a woman. Later I learned that he wrote the original story for the well‑known film Muddy River (泥の河).