The Human Condition Is One of Yearning

I just finished The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama the other day. It's been on my shelf for a couple of years now, chosen from thousands of other novels at the Five Colleges Book Sale because I loved the cover.

This is a wonderful book, told in rather spare prose. A young Chinese man, suffering from tuberculosis, is sent to live on the Japanese seaside in a cottage built by his grandfather so that he can recover his health.

It's 1938 and the Japanese have invaded China, brutalizing the people and the countryside.

But in the village of Tarumi, drama is understated and the war, at first, a quiet voice heard on the radio from time to time.

To me, the whole book is about human yearnings—for health, for love, for beauty, for courage, for peace and harmony. I've long thought that yearning is probably the most powerful of all human emotions because it's part of all the others. When you love, you yearn for emotional and physical contact. If you hate, you yearn to dominate or destroy your enemy. Anger, to me, is a yearning to control. Desire is yearning with a different name.

Uncontrolled yearning becomes lust—for power, for sex, for money, for dominance. Acknowledged yearning is the quiet wail of a saxophone heard in the dark, a piercing of the heart, a connection.

This was a good book, a novel that's more contemplation than action (though lots of things happen), my preferred mode as I turn toward my next year.