| NOTA |
(★)(Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker)(Titulo original : 名人 [Meijin]／ This is the novel -at once elegiac and suffused with life- that Yasunari Kawabata, the internationally acclaimed Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, considered to be his finest work. It centers on a single game of Go, the ultimate contest for supremacy between the hitherto invincible Master of Go and his younger, more modern challenger.／ It is a game extended over many months of play, a game whose elevated atmosphere of ceremony increasingly gives way before the complex human tensions not only between the Master and the Challenger but between their wives, their retinues, and the two worlds and sensibilities they represent. For the game is the framework : the true subject of Kawabata´s profoundly moving novel is the contest between tradition and change, between the old Japan and the new and, ultimately, between life and death.／ ◆Yasunari Kawabata [1899-1972] was born in Osaka. As a boy he hoped to become a painter, an aspiration reflected throughout his novels. But he early decided to devote himself to writing ; his first stories were published while he was still at school. His prodigious talent was introduced to Western readers in 1954 with the appearance of ´The Izu Dancer´[originally published in Japan in 1925, a year after the author´s graduation from Tokyo Imperial University]. The subsequent publication of three brilliantly acclaimed novels -´Snow Country´,´Thousand Cranes´and´The Sound of the Mountain´- brought Kawabata ever-widening recognition. At the age of seventy-three, he died by his own hand, leaving no note of explanation. He was the undisputed doyen of Japanese letters.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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