Word: nobuko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Japanese say that in the finest tea one can taste the water with which it was made. Lady of Beauty is just such a subtle cup of literary tea. In it, Kikou Yamata, daughter of a Japanese diplomat and a French mother, tells the story of Nobuko Hayashi, aloof, highborn and exquisite, and how the war racked and finally killed her without using a bullet or a bomb. At once surface and symbol, Lady of Beauty is a quiet requiem for a culture as well as a person, by a mourner who remains charmingly alive...
...Nobuko, the lady of beauty, is fortyish, and lives in a fine villa by the sea near Tokyo. She is married to a wealthy financier, and possessively loves her young and only son. True, she must share her husband's affection with a common geisha in Tokyo, but she neither rants nor strays from the marital quilt. Proud of the firm body her husband neglects, she swims in the crashing offshore combers, or takes up the foils with her son's fencing master. Nominally a Roman Catholic convert, Nobuko finds her true religion in the classic No plays...
...threat of it foreclose the lady's world. Needing the gardener's quarters, she asks him to sleep off premises, and he commits suicide. The police curb offshore swimming, the No plays are closed down. To cap these indignities, when Nobuko's son falls ill, her husband's geisha flaunts her status by sending a get-well present for the boy. Nobuko, who almost never sees her husband any more, falls ill (tuberculosis of the bone). In nightly agonies of pain, she struggles with Death, "fighting like a child with only one weapon, talking...
...mayor of Alhambra (pop. 52,753), Calif, presented a big bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Nobuko Coronel, Filipino-Japanese war bride of a hometown veteran, to help convince her that she was welcome in the U.S. The greeting ceremony was arranged (and more than 70 citizens were moved to write letters of welcome) after a local citizen had sent her a note condemning her marriage to Corporal Robert A. Coronel and warning her that she was not wanted in Alhambra...