| NOTA |
(★)(Remarkably, this is the first full-length study of Kawabata, Japan´s first Nobel laureate for literature. It is also the third and final volume of Roy Starrs´ trilogy looking in depth at three of Japan´s top twentieth-century authors. (1.´Deadly Dialectics´, Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima, 2.´An Artless Art´, The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya)／ Kawabata is most widely known as the author of ´Snow Country (1948)´ and ´The Sound of the Mountain (1954)´ --the latter being the culminating masterpiece of the author´s controversial career, and one of the great novels of twentieth-century world literature. Other key representative works analysed in this study are ´Crystal Fantasies, ´Thousand Cranes´, ´The Master of Go´ and ´Sleeping Beauties´.)／ ([from ´INTRODUCTION´] I have chosen to concentrate in more depth on a few representative works from each stage of the five decades of his active career, from the 1920s to the 1960s. With only one or two exceptions, the works I have singled out are rather obvious choices, those generally regarded as his most significant ´serious´ works of literature. To some extent Kawabata himself makes these choices easy : though prolific, much of the fiction he wrote was ´sub-literary´, intended as ´throw-away´ popular entertainment for women´s magazines --a kind of writing for which, to the benefit of his pocket-book if not his reputation, he seems to have possessed a great facility.／ I divide his career into five major stages. From about 1914 to 1925 was a period of ´self-discovery´ during which Kawabata, like many writers before him, grew to self-awareness as both a man and an artist through the writing of autobiographical sketches and stories.／ The period culminated in his first masterpiece, ´The Dancing Girl of Izu´, which firmly established his position as an important up-and-coming writer, and was in this sense his real ´debut work´. From about the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s was a period of ´experiment and expansion´, during which, under the influence of the European modernism which, by a fortunate coincidence, was flourishing exactly at that time, the young writer ventured far beyond the traditional style and themes of his early ´lyrical´ writings.／ Although the creative products of this period were of varying success, Kawabata grew enormously as an artist through these experiences and learned much that would prove of lasting value to him.／ Thus, during his next phase, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, which I would describe as that of his ´early maturity´, he was able to return to a style that was to some extent traditional but considerably enriched by what he had learned from his ´modernist experiments´. The representative work of this period is, of course, his first great ´haiku novel´, ´Snow Country´.／ The fourth phase of Kawabata´s career, resumed after the brief hiatus in his writing caused by the Pacific War, consists of the great flowering of his art which occurred in the immediate postwar period. This may be described as his period of ´late maturity´, in which his haiku novel achieved a new level ofsignificance and perfection with ´The Sound of the Mountain´. The works of this period are pervaded by a mood of gentle, elegiac melancholy, something like the ´mono no aware´ pathos of traditional Japanese literature, and this may be read as a response to both a historical and a personal situation : on the one hand, Japan´s defeat and the threat this seemed to pose to the native cultural tradition and, on the other, Kawabata´s own sense of the incipient encroachment of old age.／ The fifth and final stage, which could perhaps be described as that of his ´post-maturity´, was in several senses a period of decline : from the late 1950s onwards Kawabata wrote relatively little and the deterioration in his physical and psychological health led ultimately to his tragic suicide in 1972. But this period of his ´decadence´ was nonetheless marked by an appropriately dark florescence, in the form of two remarkable ´flowers of evil´, ´Sleeping Beauties´ and ´One Arm´. These two studies in the dehumanization of sex at the service of male narcissism are as masterful in their style and fictional technique as anything Kawabata ever wrote.／ Finally, although one must take account of the negative and, for any reader, potentially depressing aspects of Kawabata´s work, one should also acknowledge that his work ultimately triumphs over all of these --not by any facile ´happy ending´ nor by any explicit statement of an optimistic philosophy but, as great writing should, by the power and beauty of its language. There is a quiet, meditative, poetic quality to Kawabata´s language which speaks more eloquently of a victory of the spirit over suffering and of a serene joy in life than any explicit statement could do.／ ▼CONTENTS／ ●1.An Orphan Psychology ●2.An Ambiguous Redemption ●3.Experiment and Expansion ●4.Between Tradition and Modernity ●5.Elegies for A Dying Tradition ●6.Time and Anti-time ●7.Narcissus in Winter／) |
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