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Yasunari Kawabata ______________
Japan (1899-1972)
Kawabata was the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works combined old Japan's beauty with modernist trends, realism with surrealistic visions.
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka into a prosperous and cultured family. He learned to know loneliness and rootlessness early in life. He was orphaned at age of three, his grandmother died when he was seven, and his only sister died when he was nine. The family deaths deprived Kawabata of a normal childhood and some critics has seen that these early traumas formed the background for the sense of loss and regret which runs through his writing. In 1920 he started his literature studies at Tokyo Imperial University and graduated in 1924. With a group of young writers, Kawabata founded the journal Bungei Jidai (Contemporary Literature), an advocate of the Neo-Sensualist movement, which opposed the dominating realistic school of writing and was interested in European avant-garde literature.
During World War II Kawabata remained neutral and travelled in Manchuria, and studied The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century Japanese novel. In 1954 appeared Kawabata's perhaps best work, YAMA NO OTO (The Sound of the Mountain), which depicted family crisis in a series of linked episodes.
Kawabata condemned suicide in his Nobel acceptance speech, perhaps remembering several of his fellow writers who had died by their own hands. However, Kawabata had long suffered from poor health and on April 16, 1972, two years after Mishima's suicide, Kawabata committed suicide in Zushi by gassing himself. He left no note. (Books and Writers)
MAJOR WORKS:
Kawabata, Yasunari. "Japan, the Beautiful and Myself." Nobel Lecture. December 12, 1968. Kawabata's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he offers insights into his own works, as well as the Japanese concepts of beauty and truth. Must reading for all Kawabata fans.
Larson, Rebecca D. Larson. "Yoshimoto Banana and Kawabata Yasunari." Japan Ink: An On-line Journal of Japanese Studies. Brief but useful comments on Sound of the Mountain. Boardman, Gwenn R. "Kawabata Yasunari: A Critical Introduction." Journal of Modern Literature 2.1 (September 1971):
86-105. Excellent introduction to Kawabata's work. Obuchowski, Mary DeJong. "Theme and Image in Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain." World Literature Today 51:2 (Spring 1977): 207-210. Short but insightful article. Mathy, Francis. "Kawabata Yasunari: Bridge-Builder to the West." Monumenta Nipponica 24.3 (1969): 211-217.
Good short overview of his work, focusing on whether he is a nihilist or not. Yamagiwa, Joseph K. "Fiction in Post-War Japan."
The Far Eastern Quarterly 13.1 (November1953): 3-22. Article discusses Kawabata and other Japanese writers in the context of Japanese society after the war. Feenberg, Andrew. "Alternative Modernity? Playing the Japanese Game of Culture." Cultural Critique, 1994-1995 (Winter): 107-138.) Lengthy but excellent article on Kawabata's literary philosophy, focusing on The Master of Go. Stars, Roy. Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata. Surrey: Japan Library, 1998.
Gessel, Van C. Three Modern Novelists. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993.
Rimer, J. Thomas. Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Iga, Mamoru. "Personal Situation as a Factor in Suicide with Reference to Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima." In Between Survival and Suicide. ed. Benjamin B. Wolman. 103-128. New York: Gardner Press. 1976.
Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Macintosh, Masao. Accomplices of Silence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Includes discussion of The Sound of the Mountain.
"Kawabata Yasunari: Snow in the Mirror." Critique, Studies in Modern Fiction 11.3 (1969): 5-15.
"Tradition and Modernity in Japanese Suicide: the Case of Yasunari Kawabata." Journal of Asian and African Studies 10.3-4 (July-October 1975): 176-187.
Seidensticker, Edward. "Kawabata." The Hudson Review 22.1 (Spring, 1969): 7-10.
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