Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972): Tradition versus Modernity

Abstract

literature. prize, once monopolized by Western writers, was given to a Japanese for the first time in 1968. x Japan had arrived as a modern nation in the economic and political sense, and it had staged the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 superbly. Perhaps the time had come to recognize a great Japanese writer, a hundred years after Japan's entry into the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. paradox is that Kawabata, who seems to have been recognized for Japans modernity, focused on traditional culture and gave little attention to things modern and Western, even though he wrote in a Japan undergoing modernization and all his novels had a contemporary setting. It is a truism that novels provide some of the best primary sources for writing social history, as the popularity of such works tells us what people think is important about themselves. One would expect that Japan's one writer to achieve worldwide celebrity as a Nobel laureate would provide a deep well of materials on class and family, on work and leisure. Such is not the case. historian would do better to look to Kawabata's contemporaries such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, who wrote the classic novel of the Japanese family Makioka Sisters (1944-48), or even Yukio Mishima, who re-created both the world of the Taisho elites (in Spring Snow, 1968) and that of the right-wing patriots of the early Showa era (in Runaway Horses, 1969). Instead, it is a private world of beauty and culture that engages Kawabata, who belonged to the so-called lyric school of Japanese writing. He consciously rejected the proletarian school, which was in vogue during his university days in the 1920s; and he eschewed commentary on social and political problems, at least in his literary works, throughout his career. Still, the historian must put Kawabata in the context of his times and reconstruct those times as best he can from the fragments about the world around the writers and artists, the dilettantes and lovely traditional Japanese women who inhabit his stories. This most eminent writer lived and worked through turbulent times: the Taisho democracy, Showa militarism, the Pacific War, the American Occupation, and at the end the Economic Miracle or at least its beginnings. As with most Japanese writers, Kawabata's work tends to be autobiographical. Edward Seidens ticker has asserted that Kawabata was much like the men he wrote about, in contrast to Tanizaki, who created protagonists very different from himself. young student depicted in The Izu Dancer (1926) who goes down the Izu peninsula on vacation and carries on a tentative romance with the little dancer from the traveling troupe is undoubtedly the adolescent Kawabata. Tokyo dilettante Shimamura who is the protagonist of Snow Country (1935-48), with his halfbaked learning about the European ballet, is ostensibly the kind of person Kawabata disdained, yet he has the same tastes in women and an identical love of traditional crafts such as the making of chijimi cloth by peasants working in the snows of the North. old men who have memory lapses or face death or are romantically linked with much younger women in the later works are undoubtedly alter egos of the author.2 Kawabata was a man of his times, one who emphasized certain themes at the expense of others and was more concerned about the decline of an old culture than about the emergence of a new society or econ-