Aesthetics as Investigation of Self, Subject, and Ethical Agency in Postwar Trauma in Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain

Abstract

Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel The Sound of the Mountain is widely praised for its aesthetic qualities, from its adaptation of aesthetics from The Tale of Genji , through the beauty of its prose and the patterning of its images, to the references to arts and nature within the text. This essay, by contrast, shows that Kawabata uses these features to demonstrate the effects of the mass trauma following World War II and the complicated grief it induced, on the psychology of moral/ethical understanding, decision making, and action.