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Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) |
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In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among his most famous works are Yukiguni (The Snow Country, 1948), Senbazuru (Thousand Cranes, 1952), and Yama no Oto (The Sound of the Mountain, 1954). The style of Kawabata's stories have been described as "melancholy lyricism." His novels combine the beauty of old Japan with modernist trends, realism and formal austerity with surrealistic visions. "The "secret" of their being up in the tree had continued for almost two years now. Where the thick trunk branched out near the top, the two could sit comfortably. Michiko, straddling one branch, leaned back against another. There were days when little birds came and days when the wind sang through the pine needles. Although they weren't that high off the ground, these two little lovers felt as if they were in a completely different world, far away from the earth." ('Up in the Tree,' in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, 1988) Yasunari Kawabata was born into a prosperous family in Osaka, Japan. His father, Eikichi Kawabata, was a prominent physician, who died of tuberculosis when Yasunari was just two. He was orphaned by the death of his mother at age three, his grandmother died when he was seven, and his only sister when he was nine. The family deaths deprived Kawabata of a normal childhood, and he often said that he learned loneliness and rootlessness early. The author described himself as a child "without home or family." Some critics feel that these early traumas form the background for the sense of loss and regret which permeate his writing.
After losing his grandfather in 1915, Kawabata moved to a
middle-school dormitory. Originally Kawabata thought of becoming a
painter, but at the age of twelve he delved into Buddhist
scriptures. In 1920, Kawabata began study literature at Tokyo Imperial
University, graduating in 1924. With Riichi Yokomitsu and other young writers Kawabata founded the journal Bungei Jidai (The Artistic Age). It advocated for a literary movement called Shinkankaku (Neo-Sensualism), which opposed the then dominant "realistic" school of writing. For a periof Kawabata was interested in European avant-garde literature, but he then adopted a more traditional style. Together with the director Teinosuke Kinugasa, Kawabata wrote the script for the expressionist movie, Kurutta Ippeiji (A Page of Madness, 1926). Izu-no
Odoriko (The Izu Dancer, 1925) was Kawabata's first critical success. This autobiographical novella recounted
his youthful infatuation with a fourteen-year-old dancer, whose legs
streched "up like a paulownia sapling". The story ends with their
separation. Young women also appear prominently in other Kawabata's
works, such as Nemureru bijo (Sleeping Beauty) from 1961 and the
short novel Tanpopo
(Dandelion), published posthumously. Donald Keene, a famed translator
of Japanese literature, has argued that young, virginial women
represented for Kawabata the essence of beauty. ('Kawabata's wartime message in Beautiful Voyage (Utsukushii tabi)' by Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, in Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan, edited by Rachael Hutchinson, 2013, p. 89) The fragmented novel Asakusa Kurenaidan (The Scarlet
Gang of Asakusa, 1929-1930) was set in the Asakusa district of Tokyo,
famous for its geisha houses, dancers, bars, prostitutes, and theaters. It was serialized in the Asashi Shimbun newspaper,
bringing modernist, experimental fiction to a wider audience within
Japan. In 1931 Kawabata married Hideko Matsubayashi, with whom he had lived since the mid-1920s. They lived in the
ancient samurai capital of Kamakura, southwest of Tokyo, spending the
winters in Zushi. Kawabata's 2-story wooden house in Karuizawa, which he purchased in 1940, was demolished in 2021. During World War II, Kawabata traveled in Manchuria,
and studied traditional Japanese aesthetics as exemplified in the
eleventh-century novel Genji Monogatari (The
Tale of Genji). The travels in different parts of the
Empire of the Sun streghtened his national identity. In Manchuco, which
the government described as "utopia" and "the land of hope," he felt
like a
literary emissary from a superior culture. His primary interest was
children's education. "I wonder if children in China and Manchuco write
through their own voice," he said. "Their
compositions (written in Japanese) that I saw were antiquated and
stereotypical. Their writings lags behind Japan." ('Kawabata's wartime message in Beautiful Voyage (Utsukushii tabi)' by Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, in Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan, edited by Rachael Hutchinson, 2013, p. 84) For the Manchuria Daily News he wrote an unfinished serialized novel, entitled Tokaido (The Way East), in which a high school teacher lectures his daughter on the Japanese culture. Soon after the war, Kawabata published his most famous novel, Yukiguni (The Snow Country, 1948), the story of a middle-aged aesthete, Shimamura, and an aging geisha, Komako. Their sporadic affair is conducted intermittently in an isolated location; a hot spring resort west of the central mountains, where winters are dark, long and silent. Shimamura thinks to himself , "After all, these fingers keep a vivid memory of the woman I am going to see," when he travels to the snow country by train. It takes him to another place, away from the ballet book he is writing, away from his mundane life. But this far-off destination gives him only a temporary home, a reflection of something else when night transforms the coach's window into a mirror. Geisha is a performance artist and Shimamura doesn't know, whether her affection is really genuine. Komako bites his finger; she is not a reflection, created according to Shimamura's aesthetic vision, she is a physical being. Kawabata later mentioned that he modeled her after a real character. Yukiguni was publised in an unfinished version in 1937, Yukiguni has been filmed several times, Shiro Toyoda version from 1957, starring Kishi Keiko as Komako and Ryo Ikebe as Shimamura, is considered the most successful. "In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it." (The Snow Country) Considered by some critics to be Kawabata's best work, Yama no
Oto (The Sound of the Mountains, 1954), depicts a family crisis in
a series of linked episodes. The protagonist, Shingo, represents the
traditional Japanese values of in human relationships and nature. He is
concerned about the marital crises of his two children. Scenes from
this hero's daily life are interwoven with poetic descriptions of
nature, dreams, and recollections. This work earned Kawabata the
literary prize of the Japanese Academy. Kawabata combined refined
Japanese aesthetics with psychological narrative and eroticism. Senbazuru (A Thousand Cranes, 1952), used the traditional Japanese tea ceremony as a background to a story based on the classical work Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji). Noteworthy, Kawabata has emphasized that the novel is "a 'negative work' (hitei no sakuhin), an expression of doubt about and a warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen." (Trauma, Dissociation and Re-enactment in Japanese Literature and Film by David C. Stahl, 2018, p. 179) In Utsukushisa-to Kanashimi-to (Beauty and Sadness, 1965), Kawabata told of the reunion of an elderly man and a woman artist, and the revenge of the artist's young protégée. As in other works of his later life, Kawabata's approach is open-ended; more is implied, left to the imagination of the readers, than is made explicit. One of his lesser known novels in the west, Meijin (The Master of Go, 1972), was a fictionalized account of an actual 1938 Go match between an old champion and a young challenger. Go is Japan's ancient game of strategy and a Go match is concerned with the game itself, and with respect for tradition and ancient rites. Kawabata's retelling of the match (which he covered as a reporter for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun), reflects the tension between old traditions and new pragmatism. In the story, the players are isolated during parts of the match, and and finally, when the players emerge from isolation, the tradition of Go itself has lost. Kawabata considered this his finest piece of writing, although it is stark and spare compared to his other works. Many critics consider The Master of Go to be Kawabata's commentary on the Japanese culture and World War II.
As he grew older, Kawabata became famous around
the world. In the 1960s, before receiving the Nobel Prize, Kawabata
made a tour in the United States, lecturing in universities. Until
1971, Kawabata stood aloof from politics. Unsuccessfully, he supported
a conservative candidate for the governorship of Tokyo, and with Yukio Mishima
and other
writers, he signed an address condemning the Cultural Revolution in China.
He was also president of the Japanese PEN club and active in helping
aspiring writers. Over the course of his life, Kawabata wrote more than a hundred two or three page stories. He called these his "tanagokoro no shosetsu" (palm-of-the-hand stories), and said that they expressed the essence of his art. An fine example of these stories is Ki-no Ue (Up in the Tree, 1962). Here, the main characters, a girl and a boy named Michiko and Keisuke, both fourth graders, share a secret. Keisuke tells Michiko that his parents quarrel, and his father has another woman. He once climbed a tree in the garden so that his mother couldn't take him and go back to her parents' house. Since then he has been up in that tree a lot. Perhaps remembering his fellow writers who had died
by their own hands, Kawabata took a critical look at suicide in his Nobel acceptance
speech. "I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide." However, Kawabata himself had long suffered from poor
health, and on April 16, 1972, two years after Mishima's suicide,
Kawabata put his head in a gas oven at his home in Zushi. He
left no note behind; there was only an empty whiskey bottle. A few months earlier Kawabata had said in a letter to Donald Keene: "Until last year I still had hopes of a little Götterdämmerung for myself, but now I have lost these hopes. Everybody has chosen to go on living happily." (The Blue-Eyed Tarokaja: A Donald Keene Anthology, edited by J. Thomas Rimer, 1996, p. 201) Kawabata was posthumously awarded First Class Order of the Rising Sun. For further reading: Accomplices of Silence by M. Miyoshi (1974); Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, eds. by K. Tsuruta and T.E. Swann (1976); Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature by M. Ueda (1976); Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Tradition by J. Rimer (1978); Life, Death and Age in Modern Japanese Fiction, edited by R. Tsukimura (1978); The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature by Y. Hisaaki (1978); Reading against Culture by David Pollack (1992); The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima by Gwenn Boardman Petersen (1993); Three Modern Novelists by V.C. Gessel (1993); The War in Kawabata Yasunari's 'Snow Country' by Miho Matsugu (2006); Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo by Annika A. Culver (2013); 'Kawabata's wartime message in Beautiful Voyage (Utsukushii tabi)' by Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, in Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan, edited by Rachael Hutchinson (2013); Trauma, Dissociation and Re-enactment in Japanese Literature and Film by David C. Stahl (2018) - Films based on Kawabata's stories: Kurutta ippeiji, dir. by Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926; Otome-gokoro sannin shimai, dir. by Mikio Naruse, 1935; Yama no oto, dir. by Mikio Naruse, 1954; Kawa no aru shitamachi no hanasi, dir. by Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1955; Yukiguni, dir. by Shiro Toyoda, 1957; Onna no mizuumi, dir. by Yoshishige Yoshida, 1965; Utsukushisa ta kanashimi to, dir. by Masahiro Shinoda, 1965; 1980, Koto, dir. by Kon Ichikawa, 1980 - Special thanks to Mr. Long Shiren for his help with this website. Selected works:
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