| NOTA |
(★)(Translated by J. Martin Holman)(Titulo original : 古都 [koto]／ ´The Old Capital´ is one of the three works for which Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Set in Kyoto -the old capital of Japan for a thousand years- this lyric novel traces the life of Chieko, the beloved adopted daughter of a kimono designer and his wife.／ Believing that she had been kidnapped by the couple as a baby, Chieko learns one day that she was instead a foundling, left abandoned on a doorstep. Happy with her adopted parents, however, her security and contentment remain undisturbed until an answered prayer at the famous Yasaka Shrine dramatically alters the course of her life.／ ◆Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan´s most distinguished novelists. Born in 1899, his early ambition was to become a painter -an aspiration reflected in his later works- but his first stories were published while he was still at high school, and he turned instead to writing. In 1917 he left his native Osaka to study literature in Tokyo, and in 1927, three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University, he published the short novel,´The Izu Dancer´, which made him famous. It captures the shy eroticism of adolescence, and from that time Kawabata devoted his novels largely to aspects of love, shot through with melancholy and loss. Three of his major works fall into this category :´Snow Country´,´Thousand Cranes´, and ´The Sound of the Mountain´.´The Old Capital´ was one of his last novels, published in 1962. Three years after the Nobel award, Kawabata died an untimely and even now inadequately explained death. He was found in a gas-filled room in an apartment near his Kamakura home. Everything suggests suicide, but no note was found and many still argue that it may have been an accident. Over two decades after his death in 1972, Yasunari Kawabata remains one of Japan´s most distinguished and widely translated writers.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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