In "Maihime", the concept of "the realm of the wicked" (魔界) was introduced, but what happens when one actually enters it? "Mizuumi" might be a novella, but is a psychologically turbulent one. Here, Kawabata offers an insight into his vision of dystopia in a rare outing of stream-of-consciousness narration. As a metaphor for the defeated nation of WWII, it encapsulates all the powerless sentiments of living as a "loser". Much like "Pelleas and Melisande", various forms of water provide unifying backdrops linking themes together in an otherwise fluid progression - the protagonist was born to a lake-side house; he lost his father in said lake; he was rejected by his first crush by the lake; he discovered his own ugliness in a bathhouse; he failed as a schoolteacher and was reduced to robbing a woman called Mizuki Miyako ("mizu" means water in Japanese), who herself lives off a sugar daddy to support her brother's education, who in turn has a good friend called Mizuno, with whose 15-year-old girlfriend the protagonist falls in love and stalks; he loiters in a sewage after failing an affair with his former student; he is confronted by Mizuno and eventually resigns from further perverted advances by a river. Almost everything goes wrong for the protagonist but the novella offers a slightly positive resolution in the end: he maintains some decency by rejecting the advances of a random encounter and facing his own ugliness (of the foot) directly and charges on. Perhaps it is what they call honour. This is a dark work, elegantly structured and as ever intellectually stimulating. Perhaps not the best entry point, but one that is essential when one has entered the world of Kawabata.
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