One Arm

10/02/2023

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Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and died, by his own hand in 1972. When Kawabata “accepted the Nobel Prize, [in 1968] he said that in his work he tried to beautify death and to seek harmony among man, nature, and emptiness.” (Britannica) These elements are all present in his short story, 'One Arm', but there is also the presence of the fantastic.

The fantastic is a mode that feels under no obligation to turn its metaphoric aspect into scientific possibility. When we hear that Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero wanted to see if he could complete the first head transplant, it made sense that a headline would be ‘Science or Science Fiction’. It is the headline The Independent offered when saying “in a specially equipped hospital suite, two surgical teams will work simultaneously — one focused on [patient] Spiridonov and the other on the donor’s body, selected from a brain-dead patient and matched with the Russian for height, build and immunotype.” The patient eventually backed out, with Canavero no longer able to turn his dream into a reality. But anybody who chose to film such a scenario would nevertheless be falling into science fiction rather than fantasy, using the possibilities of science even if the operation turns out to be an impossible aim.

In Kawabata’s 'One Arm', the elderly narrator goes off with a young woman’s limb and becomes so attached to it that he in turn removes his right arm and replaces it with hers. She gives it to him voluntarily, saying “I can let you have the arm for the night” as she takes it from her shoulder. We don’t know how this is done practically. After, he walks with the arm hidden under his raincoat, deciding against getting a taxi or a streetcar: imagine if the arm might cry out, he wonders, and then what would people think? Kawabata’s story might have started with the impossible premise that a man has temporarily accessed another’s arm but that doesn’t mean because of the absurdity of the conceit it mustn’t promptly return to the mundane: to the presence of embarrassment, shame and propriety. It wants to create a paradoxically fantastic reality but doesn’t need science to achieve it. Kawabata makes no attempt at describing how a limb can so casually be removed, but he does quickly inform us that here is a man who knows the social rules. 

Like other works of the literary fantastic, like Borges’ The Aleph’, Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ and Cortazar’s ‘Axolotl’, it has little interest in the science fictional justification for the premise (as in Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Bunker’ or ‘The Voices of Time’) nor, as in generic fantasy, in the development of an alternative world as we find in Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nor is it quite an allegory, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm and to a lesser degree Arthur Miller’s entirely plausible and historical The Crucible. The literary fantastic, S/F, Fantasy and allegory are far from fixed categories but what we often find in the literary fantastic is the normal world given a mild twist amongst the otherwise normal. (S/F for example, tends to create an alternative and broad social reality.) It is partly why the literary fantastic often fits into Freud’s notion of the uncanny, with his claim, “The German word ‘Unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘Heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘Heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.” (‘The Uncanny’) 

Often fully fantastic worlds are far less uncanny than one where the world remains normal with an odd detail that is strange, and it is into this world stories like ‘One Arm’ fits. It makes sense that under the raincoat the girl’s arm would be colder than his hand since he still has blood pumping through his body and the arm is now an isolated limb. But then it doesn’t make any sense that the limb has been removed without trauma to the body of the woman to whom it earlier that night belonged. Later, the narrator hears on the radio that as the fog was getting thicker: “it announced that three planes unable to land in the fog had been circling the airport for a half hour.” He thinks: “it seemed to me that tonight, with only one arm, she [the one whose arm he has in his possession] should take the advice of the radio and qo quietly to bed. I hoped she would sleep peacefully.” 

 We might assume the fog outside isn’t her most pressing concern, but such preoccupations with the banal next to the exaggerated is common in the literary fantastic. In ‘Metamorphosis’, Gregor Samsa may have turned into a gigantic insect but he is still fretting over how he can get to work as he needs to help pay off the family debts. In ‘The Aleph’, the narrator may see a world in a basement where all things are viewed simultaneously but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still jealous of his literary rival who has introduced him to the Aleph as he pretends he sees nothing at all. 

In ‘One Arm’, the limb soon reveals its personality and tells him to behave himself after “taking the palm of the hand in my own right palm and the shoulder in my left hand, I flexed the elbow, and then again.” The arm’s presence invokes the whole of the woman and his memories of her, how she would put her elbows on the table, folding her hands loosely and resting her chin or cheek on them. But the arm also reminds him of other women, including one “who had decided to give herself to me, one not as beautiful as the girl who had lent me the arm. Perhaps there was something strange about her.” Here, the narrator also proposes that as this woman gave herself to him he “could never accept the surrender, even knowing that the body of every woman was made for it.” Maybe it is because he reckons it rests on “some spiritual debility I suffer from.” 

The story’s development is based on the central character’s fetishistic relationship with women, as in many other Kawabata stories and novels, and the conceit with the arm allows for this opportunity. When the narrator says, “I had once heard a story that women were less happy in the throes of ecstasy than sleeping peacefully beside their men” we might be reminded of one of Kawabata’s most famous works, The House of the Sleeping Beauties. In this novella, older men go to the house of the title literally to sleep with young women. In the novel, the central character’s thoughts and dreams intermingle as he lies usually next to a different woman each time he visits. In Snow Country, a young Geisha girl falls in love with the wealthy, financially independent central character Shimamura, unprofessionally allowing her feelings to intrude while he remains ambivalent and detached. She is a fetish object who ought not to become a central subject.

This detachment, however troublesome we may find it, is the condition of many men in Kawabata’s work even if here the detachment is of course the arm of the title. But if one invokes the metaphorical in the literary fantastic it rests partly on the way writers like Kafka, Kawabata, Borges and others use the fantastic element all the better to register a thematic focus the fantasy serves. Kafka’s tales are frequently about guilty, impotent figures and there Gregor is hardly able to get out of bed and unable to get to work though his family relies on him financially. Borges’s stories frequently muse over metaphysical problems of time and space and why not a basement in a house soon to be demolished to suggest the entire world contained in one moment? If Kawabata is centrally interested in characters who remain removed from their surroundings and situations, who are interested in modulated feeling over romantic ecstasy, in the resonances of attachment rather than the development of conventional feeling, then the arm of the title proves very metaphorically useful indeed. 

One may notice that the metaphor here becomes metonymic. In ‘Metamorphosis’ we could say that Gregor has generally felt like an insect and Kafka turns such a simile into an extended metaphor as Gregor becomes that very thing. In contrast, we could say that One Arm isn’t an extended metaphor but an extended metonymy (or more strictly synecdoche, as we see the part signifying the whole). 

Yet of course metonymy, like metaphor, can also segue into the fetish, as a person is attracted to the part that signifies the whole sexually, with someone seeing themselves as a legs man, or a breast man, or someone who likes a person with a six-pack or nice eyes. Indeed we can think of Freud again, who differentiates between sexual fetishes that could be seen as consistent with metonymy and metaphor, with the legs man interested in the part that signifies or is associated with the whole, while others are strictly metaphorical, an abstraction that has nothing to do with the potential sexual object as such — as we may find a person’s obsession with fur, which Freud and, of course, Sacher-Masoch noted. Nevertheless, these are still general fetishes, whether concrete or abstract, that remain within the laws of science and reason. If Kawabata’s work often suggests a much more singular interest, one that releases all the better a subjective response, but stays within those laws, here he pushes into the literary fantastic as the arm comes alive partly perhaps through the attention the narrator gives to it, how he makes the arm his own. At the beginning of the story, the girl who gives it to him says, “it only does what an arm does. If it talks I’ll be afraid to have it back. But try anyway.” 

Yet the arm does talk to him, saying when he gets back to the apartment, “so this is where we spend the night”, and adding later, when he sucks on the shadow inside the elbow, “it tickles, do behave yourself.” Before the end of the story, he will remove his right arm and put hers on instead, an act of union that might seem in some ways the opposite of fetishism, or its ultimate conclusion. How to make the ‘other’ a part of ourselves may often be the cry of the obsessive, and resolves its impossibility in a fascination with a part of the body or the complete abstraction of it, be it legs or fur. Kawabata goes further and uses the freedom to explore a feeling through a conceit that need be no more developed than the suggestive, in exploring how desire might manifest itself if it weren’t limited by the logic of our physical universe. He provocatively explores a narrator who is, we might say, a one-arm bandit, someone who insists on taking a metonymic obsession to its proper conclusion. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

One Arm

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and died, by his own hand in 1972. When Kawabata “accepted the Nobel Prize, [in 1968] he said that in his work he tried to beautify death and to seek harmony among man, nature, and emptiness.” (Britannica) These elements are all present in his short story, 'One Arm', but there is also the presence of the fantastic.

The fantastic is a mode that feels under no obligation to turn its metaphoric aspect into scientific possibility. When we hear that Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero wanted to see if he could complete the first head transplant, it made sense that a headline would be ‘Science or Science Fiction’. It is the headline The Independent offered when saying “in a specially equipped hospital suite, two surgical teams will work simultaneously — one focused on [patient] Spiridonov and the other on the donor’s body, selected from a brain-dead patient and matched with the Russian for height, build and immunotype.” The patient eventually backed out, with Canavero no longer able to turn his dream into a reality. But anybody who chose to film such a scenario would nevertheless be falling into science fiction rather than fantasy, using the possibilities of science even if the operation turns out to be an impossible aim.

In Kawabata’s 'One Arm', the elderly narrator goes off with a young woman’s limb and becomes so attached to it that he in turn removes his right arm and replaces it with hers. She gives it to him voluntarily, saying “I can let you have the arm for the night” as she takes it from her shoulder. We don’t know how this is done practically. After, he walks with the arm hidden under his raincoat, deciding against getting a taxi or a streetcar: imagine if the arm might cry out, he wonders, and then what would people think? Kawabata’s story might have started with the impossible premise that a man has temporarily accessed another’s arm but that doesn’t mean because of the absurdity of the conceit it mustn’t promptly return to the mundane: to the presence of embarrassment, shame and propriety. It wants to create a paradoxically fantastic reality but doesn’t need science to achieve it. Kawabata makes no attempt at describing how a limb can so casually be removed, but he does quickly inform us that here is a man who knows the social rules. 

Like other works of the literary fantastic, like Borges’ The Aleph’, Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, Gogol’s ‘The Nose’ and Cortazar’s ‘Axolotl’, it has little interest in the science fictional justification for the premise (as in Ballard’s ‘The Terminal Bunker’ or ‘The Voices of Time’) nor, as in generic fantasy, in the development of an alternative world as we find in Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nor is it quite an allegory, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm and to a lesser degree Arthur Miller’s entirely plausible and historical The Crucible. The literary fantastic, S/F, Fantasy and allegory are far from fixed categories but what we often find in the literary fantastic is the normal world given a mild twist amongst the otherwise normal. (S/F for example, tends to create an alternative and broad social reality.) It is partly why the literary fantastic often fits into Freud’s notion of the uncanny, with his claim, “The German word ‘Unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘Heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘Heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.” (‘The Uncanny’) 

Often fully fantastic worlds are far less uncanny than one where the world remains normal with an odd detail that is strange, and it is into this world stories like ‘One Arm’ fits. It makes sense that under the raincoat the girl’s arm would be colder than his hand since he still has blood pumping through his body and the arm is now an isolated limb. But then it doesn’t make any sense that the limb has been removed without trauma to the body of the woman to whom it earlier that night belonged. Later, the narrator hears on the radio that as the fog was getting thicker: “it announced that three planes unable to land in the fog had been circling the airport for a half hour.” He thinks: “it seemed to me that tonight, with only one arm, she [the one whose arm he has in his possession] should take the advice of the radio and qo quietly to bed. I hoped she would sleep peacefully.” 

 We might assume the fog outside isn’t her most pressing concern, but such preoccupations with the banal next to the exaggerated is common in the literary fantastic. In ‘Metamorphosis’, Gregor Samsa may have turned into a gigantic insect but he is still fretting over how he can get to work as he needs to help pay off the family debts. In ‘The Aleph’, the narrator may see a world in a basement where all things are viewed simultaneously but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still jealous of his literary rival who has introduced him to the Aleph as he pretends he sees nothing at all. 

In ‘One Arm’, the limb soon reveals its personality and tells him to behave himself after “taking the palm of the hand in my own right palm and the shoulder in my left hand, I flexed the elbow, and then again.” The arm’s presence invokes the whole of the woman and his memories of her, how she would put her elbows on the table, folding her hands loosely and resting her chin or cheek on them. But the arm also reminds him of other women, including one “who had decided to give herself to me, one not as beautiful as the girl who had lent me the arm. Perhaps there was something strange about her.” Here, the narrator also proposes that as this woman gave herself to him he “could never accept the surrender, even knowing that the body of every woman was made for it.” Maybe it is because he reckons it rests on “some spiritual debility I suffer from.” 

The story’s development is based on the central character’s fetishistic relationship with women, as in many other Kawabata stories and novels, and the conceit with the arm allows for this opportunity. When the narrator says, “I had once heard a story that women were less happy in the throes of ecstasy than sleeping peacefully beside their men” we might be reminded of one of Kawabata’s most famous works, The House of the Sleeping Beauties. In this novella, older men go to the house of the title literally to sleep with young women. In the novel, the central character’s thoughts and dreams intermingle as he lies usually next to a different woman each time he visits. In Snow Country, a young Geisha girl falls in love with the wealthy, financially independent central character Shimamura, unprofessionally allowing her feelings to intrude while he remains ambivalent and detached. She is a fetish object who ought not to become a central subject.

This detachment, however troublesome we may find it, is the condition of many men in Kawabata’s work even if here the detachment is of course the arm of the title. But if one invokes the metaphorical in the literary fantastic it rests partly on the way writers like Kafka, Kawabata, Borges and others use the fantastic element all the better to register a thematic focus the fantasy serves. Kafka’s tales are frequently about guilty, impotent figures and there Gregor is hardly able to get out of bed and unable to get to work though his family relies on him financially. Borges’s stories frequently muse over metaphysical problems of time and space and why not a basement in a house soon to be demolished to suggest the entire world contained in one moment? If Kawabata is centrally interested in characters who remain removed from their surroundings and situations, who are interested in modulated feeling over romantic ecstasy, in the resonances of attachment rather than the development of conventional feeling, then the arm of the title proves very metaphorically useful indeed. 

One may notice that the metaphor here becomes metonymic. In ‘Metamorphosis’ we could say that Gregor has generally felt like an insect and Kafka turns such a simile into an extended metaphor as Gregor becomes that very thing. In contrast, we could say that One Arm isn’t an extended metaphor but an extended metonymy (or more strictly synecdoche, as we see the part signifying the whole). 

Yet of course metonymy, like metaphor, can also segue into the fetish, as a person is attracted to the part that signifies the whole sexually, with someone seeing themselves as a legs man, or a breast man, or someone who likes a person with a six-pack or nice eyes. Indeed we can think of Freud again, who differentiates between sexual fetishes that could be seen as consistent with metonymy and metaphor, with the legs man interested in the part that signifies or is associated with the whole, while others are strictly metaphorical, an abstraction that has nothing to do with the potential sexual object as such — as we may find a person’s obsession with fur, which Freud and, of course, Sacher-Masoch noted. Nevertheless, these are still general fetishes, whether concrete or abstract, that remain within the laws of science and reason. If Kawabata’s work often suggests a much more singular interest, one that releases all the better a subjective response, but stays within those laws, here he pushes into the literary fantastic as the arm comes alive partly perhaps through the attention the narrator gives to it, how he makes the arm his own. At the beginning of the story, the girl who gives it to him says, “it only does what an arm does. If it talks I’ll be afraid to have it back. But try anyway.” 

Yet the arm does talk to him, saying when he gets back to the apartment, “so this is where we spend the night”, and adding later, when he sucks on the shadow inside the elbow, “it tickles, do behave yourself.” Before the end of the story, he will remove his right arm and put hers on instead, an act of union that might seem in some ways the opposite of fetishism, or its ultimate conclusion. How to make the ‘other’ a part of ourselves may often be the cry of the obsessive, and resolves its impossibility in a fascination with a part of the body or the complete abstraction of it, be it legs or fur. Kawabata goes further and uses the freedom to explore a feeling through a conceit that need be no more developed than the suggestive, in exploring how desire might manifest itself if it weren’t limited by the logic of our physical universe. He provocatively explores a narrator who is, we might say, a one-arm bandit, someone who insists on taking a metonymic obsession to its proper conclusion. 


© Tony McKibbin