Let's see you fail.

Characters consistently return to traditional practices, regardless of their initial attempt to stray from it.  Mawdo, offered another wife by his mother, decides to take young Nabou; he says it’s only to please his mother and keep her from dying of shame, but Aissatou retaliates by saying that it is impossible to separate emotional love from love of the flesh.  When Nabou calls Mawdo to say that her, “brother Farba has given you young Nabou to be your wife, to thank me for the worthy way in which I have brought her up,” Mawdo is still free to stay in a monogamous relationship, even though she says that, “I will never get over it if you don’t take her as your wife’ ” (Bȃ 30).  Ultimately it is a choice between his mother and Aissatou, and he chooses his mother; situational irony reveals the power of traditional roles, because regardless of his previous promises to Aissatou, he still chooses tradition.  My taking on another wife, he reverts back to the practice of polygamy.  However, if it had not been for his mother, he may have stayed monogamous with Aissatou.  His mother provides the link to a traditional practice, and when, “Every other night he would go to his mother’s place to see his other wife, so that his mother ‘would not die’, to ‘fulfill a duty’ (Bȃ 31) he chooses tradition and his mother and tradition over Aissatou and new perspectives.  Similarly, Kikuji returns to tradition in Thousand Cranes.  After Fumiko shatters the Shino bowl, he says, “I can’t just leave it,” characterizing him as a person whom can’t let go of his past, which is is only link to tradition; without his past he is free to move on and make his own choices towards a more modern way of life.  When he, “picked up the pieces again, and put them in the sleeve of his night kimono,” he is symbolically picking up pieces of his past, and keeping them with him, preventing him from moving on (Kawabata 144).  Even though Fumiko shatters the bowl, which demonstrates her the distance she tries to put between herself and her mother’s mistakes in the past, she reverts back just as much as Kikuji.  When he goes to find her, it can be inferred that she committed suicide prior to Kikuji’s arrival.  By doing that, she follows in her mother’s footsteps; though that isn’t a cultural tradition, she takes the same path that her mother did, and her mother provides her sole link to the traditions in past generations.  With Fumiko gone, Kikuji realizes that, “only Kurimoto is left” (Kawabata 147).  Irony demonstrates that sometimes, what one tries the hardest to get rid of is often times the most ever present aspect in one’s life; Kikuji avoided Chikako in any way possible.  Kurimoto Chikako links together all of the members of the affair through the tradition of the tea ceremony, and even attempts to arrange Kikuji’s marriage using it.  With Chikako being the only person left for Kikuji, it proves inevitable that he will return to her, thus returning to tradition.  Though characters within So Long a Letter and Thousand Cranes attempt to abandon traditions, it is suggested that their links to tradition through their families among others, make that impossible.  When Mawdo’s mother provides him with an opportunity to return to polygamy, he takes it, and Kikuji is left only with Chikako, his father’s mistress, whose tea ceremony binds those who were affected by the affairs.