Fire Within, Ice Above

She read him first as a schoolgirl. She never stopped. Now Carolyn Choa is turning her lifelong devotion to Yasunari Kawabata into something the stage has never quite held before.
The result is Beauty and Sadness, a world premiere opera opening in Hong Kong. It is drawn from Kawabata’s final completed novel — a book Choa describes as his most distilled work, where nothing is spare and every word has been weighed.
Choa knows the power of a Japanese story sung. With her late husband, Anthony Minghella, she helped shape one of the most beloved Madame Butterfly productions in the world. This time she reaches for something quieter and stranger.
Kawabata, she says, is like Mount Fuji. Fire all inside, ice on top, everything left unsaid.
Yet beneath that stillness runs an unusually fierce plot. At its center sits not a love triangle but a love pentagon — five lives bound together by longing, memory, and a slow-burning appetite for revenge. Oki, a celebrated novelist, returns to Kyoto to find the woman he loved and abandoned decades before. Her young protégée has other plans.
The Art of the Unsaid
The most daring choice comes at the heart of the cast. Oki, the story’s emotional engine, never speaks. He is played by a silent actor, his inner life carried instead by music and movement.
It is a bold gamble, and a fitting one. Kawabata called himself a master of the unsaid thing, and Choa has built her production in that same spirit of restraint.
A Chamber Piece with Grand Ambitions
The scale is deliberately intimate. Around 90 minutes long, with an orchestra of just 23 in the pit, the work breathes like a chamber piece rather than a spectacle.
But the artistic firepower behind it is anything but small. Composer Elena Langer brings an emotional charge and a Stravinsky-like command of rhythm. Librettist David Pountney lends his celebrated theatrical instinct. Designer Tim Yip, whose work lit up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, shapes the costumes and set. Conductor Garik Madaras completes a team gathered from Russia, Hungary, England, and China.
Choa’s staging philosophy leans on Peter Brook and his idea of the empty space. No trickery. Nothing hidden. A bare stage where mind and world can shift in a single fluid breath.
Why Hong Kong
There is no opera house here, so everything has been built from nothing — orchestra, cast, and crew assembled from scratch. Choa embraces the challenge with open eyes.
Hong Kong, she insists, is perfectly placed. Cosmopolitan, open-hearted, and brimming with talent, it loves Japanese culture deeply and reads Kawabata with feeling. The small scale even let her cast performers who truly look their parts, a rare freedom in opera.
She is nervous, of course. Five nights, a large theater, a difficult and enigmatic story that resists easy answers.
Whether the devil is the returning lover or the vengeful young student, Choa will not say. That choice, like so much of Kawabata, she leaves to us — a mystery waiting in the dark for its first audience to enter.