| NOTA |
(★)(Translated by Reiko Tsukimura)(´NI-0437´ es mismo libro. Titulo original : みずうみ [Mizuumi], 1954)(The Lake is the story of a stalker. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, he has an incurable longing that drives him to trail certain women he meets as he wanders about. The longing is for something out of reach : a beauty admired from a distance, unconsummated.／ One girl in particular obsesses him, and he lies in wait for her, to watch her pass in her white sweater and dark red skirt, a little dog tugging at the leash...／ The Lake is one of the most modern of all this Nobel laureate´s novels. Just as the hero´s interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the story swerves abruptly from present to past, from reality to fantasy. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more effective for the skill with which disparate episodes are worked together into a completed whole.／ ◆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
Print Page