| NOTA |
(*)(trans. by Edward Seidensticker)(★)(´NI-0438´ es mismo libro.)(Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata is noted for his combination of a traditional Japanese aesthetic with modernist, often surreal trends. In these three tales, superbly translated by Edward Seidensticker, erotic fantasy is underlaid with longing and memories of past loves. In the title story, the protagonist visits a brothel where elderly men spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl´s beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age. In ´One Arm´, a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night ; a surreal seduction follows as he tries to allay its fears, caresses it, and even replaces his own right arm with it. The protagonist of ´Of Birds and Beasts´ prefers the company of his pet birds and dogs to people, yet for him all living beings are beautiful objects which, though they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty. Beautiful yet chilling, richly poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading and reaffirm Kawabata´s status as a world-class writer. ◆Yasunari Kawabata was born in 1899. He described himself as a child ´without home or family´ and became, in the novelist Mishima´s words,´a perpetual traveler.´ He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. In 1917 he left his native Osaka to enter a school in Tokyo, and in 1927 --three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University-- he published a short novel,´The Izu Dancer.´ Probably his best-known work,´Snow Country,´ was completed in 1947 and has come to typify the sense of loneliness and chilly lyricism associated with the world of Kawabata. The Lake belongs to his most productive decade following the end of World War II and was first serialized in 1954, along with two other major works,´The Master of Go´ and ´The Sound of the Mountain´ ; his last two novels, ´House of the Sleeping Beauties´ and ´Koto´, were both published in the early sixties. Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968. He committed suicide in 1972.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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