Yasunari Kawabata Criticism
Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, is lauded for his evocative and precise prose that delves into the universal themes of loneliness, love, and death. His body of work, encompassing novels, short stories, and critical essays, is deeply rooted in his personal experiences of loss and the transient nature of life. This existential awareness is not only a hallmark of his masterpieces like Snow Country, House of the Sleeping Beauties, and The Master of Go, but also informs the broader narrative arcs and emotional depths of his writing. Critics such as Marian Ury and Frederick Smock commend Kawabata's economical use of language, which creates vivid imagery and a sense of poignant beauty that resonates with readers.
The intensity of Kawabata's narratives is likened by Yukio Mishima to an oppressive, airless environment, particularly in "House of the Sleeping Beauties," where existential fears are meticulously woven into the fabric of the story. Arthur G. Kimball and Gwenn Boardman Petersen have observed the recurring themes of sadness and longing, noting how these elements contribute to the timeless allure of his works. Kawabata's exploration of the human condition is further enriched by his incorporation of Japanese narrative techniques and Zen Buddhist principles, a connection highlighted by J. Thomas Rimer.
Geoffrey Grigson emphasizes Kawabata's skill in evoking deep emotional and existential themes through immediate and memorable situations, while Hisaaki Yamanouchi points to his nuanced portrayal of life and death, and the tangible versus intangible beauty. This duality is most evident in The Master of Go, where Yoshio Iwamoto and Dick Wagenaar discuss its symbolic exploration of cultural tensions between Japanese tradition and Western modernity. Kawabata's influence extends beyond his own writing, as he was a mentor to younger Japanese writers, including Mishima, who acclaimed House of the Sleeping Beauties for its formal mastery and exploration of esoteric themes of eroticism and death. Kawabata's integration of a Japanese poetic sensibility with narrative form ensures his enduring relevance in literary studies, inviting readers to continually explore the depths of his profound literary contributions.
Contents
- Principal Works
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Kawabata, Yasunari (Vol. 18)
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Stories by Kawabata
(summary)
In the following essay, Geoffrey Grigson highlights Yasunari Kawabata's masterful artistry in fiction, emphasizing his ability to create immediate and memorable situations that evoke deep emotional and existential themes, particularly in works such as "Snow Country" and "House of the Sleeping Beauties," which explore the intricacies of love, memory, and the human condition.
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Yukio Mishima
(summary)
In the following essay, Yukio Mishima contends that Yasunari Kawabata's "House of the Sleeping Beauties" is a formal and esoteric masterpiece that explores the intense interplay of lust and death through the theme of eroticism's fragmentation, while also aligning with Kawabata's recurring motif of unattainable virginal purity.
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The Last Sad Sigh: Time and Kawabata's 'The Master of Go'
(summary)
In the following essay, Iwamoto and Wagenaar argue that Yasunari Kawabata's "The Master of Go" explores the conflict between Japanese tradition and Western modernity through a Go match, symbolizing the cultural confrontation between subjective, introspective time and objective, rational time, with the narrative structure reflecting the novel's spiritual themes.
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Kawabata Yasunari, Eastern Approaches: 'Snow Country'
(summary)
In the following essay, J. Thomas Rimer explores how Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country reflects the techniques of Japanese narrative fiction and Zen Buddhist principles, particularly asymmetry, while blending traditional and modern narrative forms to capture the psychology of characters and the evocative "poetry of place."
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The Eternal Womanhood: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari
(summary)
In the following essay, Hisaaki Yamanouchi explores the thematic tensions in Yasunari Kawabata's work, such as life and death and tangible versus intangible beauty, emphasizing Kawabata's unique style that blends Japanese poetic sensibility with the novel form, particularly through symbolism and the exploration of human relationships in works like Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain, and The House of Sleeping Beauties.
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Stories by Kawabata
(summary)
- Kawabata, Yasunari (Vol. 9)
- Kawabata, Yasunari (Vol. 2)
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Kawabata, Yasunari (Vol. 107)
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Traditions and Individual Talents in Recent Japanese Fiction
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Miner discusses how Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata use different aspects of traditional Japanese literature, and how their work differs from the literature of the West.
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House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
In the following review, Sibley asserts that the title story of Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties is one of the finest works of Kawabata's late career.
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The Floating World
(summary)
In the following essay, Maddocks discusses Kawabata's The Master of Go, Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow, and the tradition of Japanese literature.
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The Master of Go
(summary)
In the following review, Friedman asserts that Kawabata's "The Master of Go may not be a novel, but it is a journalism recollected in tranquility."
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A Man and the Idea of a Woman
(summary)
In the following review, Ury praises the stories in Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
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Sweet Dreams
(summary)
In the following review, the critic asserts that the stories in Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties are linked … by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind.
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The Esoteric and the Trivial: Chess and Go in the Novels of Beckett and Kawabata
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Freese and Moorjani analyze the symbolism of the Go match in Kawabata's The Master of Go, and assert that the story is a movement toward the Master's death.
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Tragic Vision in Kawabata's The Master of Go
(summary)
In the following essay, Bourque analyzes Kawabata's The Master of Go as a modern tragedy.
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House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Stuewe asserts that in House of the Sleeping Beauties, "Kawabata's writing … confronts the most basic contradictions of human life with poise and serenity, and makes high art out of the existential ebb and flow that will ultimately lay us low."
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The Twilight Years, East and West: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain
(summary)
In the following essay, Tsuruta compares and contrasts the journeys undertaken by the aging main characters of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain.
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Dialectics and Change in Kawabata's The Master of Go
(summary)
In the following essay, Pilarcik asserts that Kawabata's 'The Master of Go' captures the poignantly beautiful fading of an era as Japan enters the modern age.
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Oriental Angst
(summary)
In the following review, Lowitz discusses the opposing forces of tradition and modernity in Kawabata's The Old Capital.
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Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972): Tradition versus Modernity
(summary)
In the following essay, DeVere Brown discusses how Kawabata focused on traditional culture in his major works.
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Small Lanterns
(summary)
In the following review, Smock calls Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories one of 'those dozen or so volumes necessary to life.'
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Kawabata: Achievements of the Nobel Laureate [1969]
(summary)
In the following essay, Araki traces Kawabata's changing style and notes "a steady progression in the refinement of his technical mastery and a development of the ability to enter deeply into his characters."
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Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
(summary)
In the following review, Anderer discusses the style and themes of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, highlighting the opportunity to redirect attention and critical inquiry toward the beginnings of Kawabata's style and the significance of this collection of his earliest work.
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Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
(summary)
In the following review, DeVere Brown praises the spare style of Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
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The Old Capital
(summary)
In the following review, Miyama Ochner analyzes the problems involved in translating Kawabata's work and asserts that J. Martin Holman's translation of Kawabata's The Old Capital "emerges as a generally faithful and competent work."
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Decoding the Beard: A Dream-Interpretation of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain
(summary)
In the following essay, Mori uses dream-interpretation to analyze the dreams of the main character of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain. He concludes that the analysis "shows at once Kawabata's great interest in Freudian concepts and his adroit use of psychoanalytic motifs in one of his major novels."
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Traditions and Individual Talents in Recent Japanese Fiction
(summary)
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Kawabata, Yasunari
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House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
Fitzsimmons is an American poet, educator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese culture. In the following highly favorable assessment of 'House of the Sleeping Beauties, he perceives a theme unifying the three stories in the volume: the 'lasting and lucid vision of one aspect of human fear.'
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An introduction to House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
(summary)
Mishima is considered one of the most important modern Japanese writers. Both prolific and versatile, he wrote dozens of novels, dramas, short stories, essays and screenplays. His works often reflect his adherence to traditional Japanese values, a dedication which was ultimately demonstrated in his ritual suicide in 1970. In the essay below, he extols the interwoven themes and precise scenic detail in the title story of the collection House of the Sleeping Beauties.
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Last Extremity: Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
In the essay below, Kimball closely scrutinizes the imagery in 'House of the Sleeping Beauties,' detecting numerous pairs of opposing or contradictory images in the story.
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A review of House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
In the following excerpt, Brock is harshly critical of the pieces in House of the Sleeping Beauties; he finds the title story, for example, "so dull that it requires positive effort to struggle through its sargasso sea of lifeless anatomical detail, to read page after page of its repetitive variations on a basically obnoxious theme."
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The Margins of life
(summary)
In the excerpt below, Masao examines Kawabata's early experimentation with European avant-garde aesthetics in several short stories. The critic finds "The Izu Dancer," however, a tradition-based piece that provides an "alternative to the eccentric internationalism of [Kawabata's] 'modernist stories.'"
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Kawabata Yasunari
(summary)
In the excerpt below, Petersen details the imagery and allusive language of 'House of the Sleeping Beauties.'
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Biblical Influence upon Yasunari Kawabata
(summary)
In the essay below, Takeda identifies Western literary influences on numerous Kawabata short stories.
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Kawabata Yasunari
(summary)
Keene is an American scholar and critic who has produced a number of translations and studies of Japanese literature. The following excerpt is taken from his discussion of Kawabata in the fiction volume of his acclaimed two-part literary history of contemporary Japanese letters. Here he surveys Kawabata's early short fiction, particularly "The Izu Dancer," placing it in the context of the author's life and artistic development.
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A World Distilled: The Short Fiction of Japan's Nobel laureate
(summary)
In the laudatory review below, Seibold admires the polish and precision of the pieces in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
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A Man and the Idea of a Woman
(summary)
[In the following favorable evaluation of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Ury notes that each of the pieces in the volume is "less a story in the usual sense than a node of storytelling, where sounds, textures, tastes, colors, trajectories and intimations are gathered, ready to expand over an invisible canvas."]
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Small lanterns
(summary)
In the following review, Smock praises the concision and the highly evocative quality of the pieces in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
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The Asymmetrical Garden: Discovering Yasunari Kawabata
(summary)
In the following essay, Palmer examines Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories in an attempt to demonstrate that the form the author employed in these pieces was much more congenial to his talents than the novel form.
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The Mysterious East
(summary)
In the essay below, Lebowitz maintains that the compression of detail in the stories in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is reflective of aspects of both primitivism and sophistication in Japanese culture.
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House of the Sleeping Beauties
(summary)
- Further Reading