Okay, I’m not a fan of romance novels. In fact, I’m going to take the risk of offending a few people who will read this by saying that romance novels are basically pornography for women. Considering that my grandmother owned hundreds of the damnable things, this is a little bit horrifying. She liked the cheap ones, where all the coverart is of a pirate, cowboy, or gangster with a woman whose breasts are barely concealed by her blouse. The implications for the psychology of this are probably damning. (Why do books by and for women feature breasts as a prominent point on the cover, anyway?) There is a style of novel, however, whose treatment of love is more interesting. I can’t call it a “genre,” because it doesn’t seem particularly internally consistent, so let’s call them “stories of attachment.” Most people have read or encountered these in some form. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a particularly good example of the type.

Books such as Unbearable Lightness are concerned primarily with how people relate to each other in a romantic and sexual context. They are not usually concerned with courtship: they are stories of attachment rather than stories of pursuit. Furthermore–oddly, perhaps–most of these books seem to be written by men, from the male perspective. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera’s protagonist, Tomas, is a womanizer who is nevertheless attached psychologically to his wife and to one principle lover. This can be interpreted in the customary way, with a vague allusion to the “virgin-whore” dichotomy, but I think that does a disservice to Kundera. Sabina is not a whore, and Teresa is not a virgin. Instead, I think the two women are examples of success–self-actualization–and failure. Sabina lives “lightly,” accepting herself and doing as she will. Teresa lives “heavily,” and is a burden and a duty to Tomas. Both are beloved of him, but ultimately Teresa leads him to suffering and death.

I recently read two Japanese stories of attachment: South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami (as previously discussed) and Snow Country, by Kawabata Yasunari. I intended to review both, but upon reflection discovered that they share many similiarities with Kundera’s novel.

Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun is unlike any of the other novels that he has written and that I have read. Unlike the others, it lacks fantastic elements beyond omitted background details. Hajime is not drawn into a shadowy Limbo (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle); fish don’t rain from the sky (Kafka on the Shore); there is no “sleeping beauty” (After Dark); and there’s no psychological city representing decay and the loss of memory (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). What replaces these fantastic elements?

As a young boy, Hajime knows a girl named Shimamoto. She isn’t physically beautiful, but the memory of their brief friendship stays with Hajime through a catastrophic high school relationship, a dreary period of working at “a company,” and his marriage. Predictably, perhaps, she reappears, and the novel becomes a question: will Hajime’s attachment to Shimamoto overwhelm his accustomedness to Yukiko? This has obvious parallels with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that Murakami had read it.

Snow Country, like the others, is this sort of novel of attachment. Shimamura, Kawabata’s main character, is a dilettante. He writes about Western dance and considers it a bonus that he’s never actually seen a ballet; his writing, Kawabata says, is a satisfying sort of self-mockery. It’s more subtle than the Murakami. Shimamura is torn between a geisha and a young village girl; his wife is an afterthought, and his love for both girls is doomed from the start. The arc of the story, needless to say, is very different from the Murakami, and Komako—the geisha—is more central than either Sabina or Shimamoto, and her competition less visible.

I would argue that none of these stories are stories of romance as such. Romanticism, after all, doesn’t last very long for most of us outside of a desire for wish-fulfillment stories, and none of these books are wish-fulfillment stories. Instead, the women represent a key philosophical decision: should I be “responsible” and attached, whatever that might entail, or should I seek idealized sexual freedom and romance? Lightness seems positive about the “freedom” answer and South of the Border about the “responsible” answer, but Snow Country is the most unambiguous. Komako and Yoko enact a doomed parody of the decision, but the choice was made long before either came onstage: Shimamura chose freedom and, in doing so, doomed himself to inconsequentiality and flitting from obsession to obsession. The plot of the novel is just the ugly ruination of the three.

Isn’t that uplifting? This is a theme that reverberates through all three novels: weightiness versus lightness; duty versus inspiration; consequentiality versus ephemerality.

I highly recommend all three novels. Lightness may be the best, overall, but the Seidensticker translation of Kawabata is subtle and skillful, and Murakami is probably the most entertaining. Just don’t come in expecting a typical Hollywood- or television-style love triangle. Or happy endings.