Immortality by Kawabata Yasunari: Story Analysis (1963)

Introduction to the Story

The 1963 short story by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari entitled "Immortality" treats the immortality of the soul quite matter-of-factly. It suggests that the ability to confer immortality lies in the memory of the living, not in the realm of the dead. The story begins with an old man and a young girl who are strangely said to be walking side by side, much like lovers, despite the apparent gap in their ages. The girl then passes through the net on a golf driving range where the man is picking up balls — a second clue that something is amiss. The reader learns that the girl, Misako, drowned herself at eighteen in the ocean near the small village to which the old man has recently returned.

Plot Summary and Narrative Ambiguity

Unlike the old man, Misako has remained forever young, immortally frozen in his mind, living on as the girl she always was. She tells him that he appears young in her eyes, and she is glad she drowned herself, because this way she will never grow old. The old man reveals his guilt: when he was young, he left Misako to seek his fortune in Tokyo. Out of despair, she killed herself. He failed in his ambitions and returned to the village in old age to take a job at the driving range, overlooking the very sea where she drowned.

It is around this point in the story that the reader begins to suspect Misako is a figment of the man's imagination. The story metaphorically illustrates how, in our memories, people who die — or whom we leave and never see again — cease to grow old. However, one detail resists such an interpretation: both the old man and Misako are said to have walked through the driving range net as though passing through a breeze, not only the ghostly girl. The reader comes to understand that the old man has, in fact, died at the opening of the story and is now permanently reunited with his former love. All is forgiven. Eventually, both of them disappear into one of the trees that the old man's ancestors have tended for hundreds of years.

Themes of Memory and Immortality

Misako says that so long as the old man lives on and remembers her, she is still alive. This is the story's central claim: immortality is conferred not through supernatural judgment but through the act of remembrance. When the man remembered her, she persisted. When he dies, they are reunited rather than separated further. The author resists judging either character — neither the formerly suicidal girl nor the old man who betrayed her in youth. In doing so, the story implies an absolute forgiveness after death, and suggests that the dead exist in a state of unity with the natural world. So long as a person is remembered, he or she never truly dies.

Conclusion

The story provides a counterbalance to the Western, Christian notion of life after death as a place of punishment and reward. Immortality, in Kawabata's telling, comes through the memory of the living rather than through the judgment of the soul. The living — like the old man during his life, and the golfers on the driving range — are preoccupied with worldly affairs, but these concerns fade after death. The story prompts the reader to reflect on those he or she has lost and how they remain unchanged in memory. It also infuses a contemporary, rather ordinary setting with transcendent significance in a way that invites the reader to look at familiar places — even a golf driving range — with new wonder and respect.