[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.]

There is little of the West in the mature art of the two greatest contemporary Japanese novelists, Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata Yasunari…. After periods of experimentation, they have modelled their styles on the two most important Japanese fictional traditions—Tanizaki on the classical monogatari style represented at its greatest in Murasaki's Tale of Genji (c. 1000), and Kawabata on the highly imagistic and compressed style of Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693). These two traditions differ from each other considerably but have common qualities which distinguish them from Western fiction….

Tanizaki is a novelist of states of mind and attitude which are developed bit by bit in plots where time seems to float by. As in reading The Tale of Genji, we must constantly add and subtract—this person's thought to that character's action, this woman's attitude from that man's conversation. Like Joyce's manicuring God, the author has retired and sits Buddha-fashion with tucked-up legs in unperturbed reflection. What is truth? or what has really happened? we ask.

For a reply, we must look at the presentation, at Tanizaki's "The Mother of Captain Shigemoto," for example. Narration is laden with "as though," "but," "however," "as if," "it is not clear," "were probably," and hosts of conditionals and subjunctives—Mr. Seidensticker's skillful equivalents of the elusive aspects and moods of Japanese verbs. Whether Tanizaki's characters are macabre like Captain Shigemoto's father, sensual like Kaname in Some Prefer Nettles, or commonplace like the sisters in A Dust of Snow, we feel less what they do or say, than what they are or seem. We can see the very essence of this art in a few sentences from "The Firefly Hunt."

The events of the evening passed through Sachiko's mind in no particular order. She opened her eyes—she might have been dreaming, she thought. Above her, in the light of the tiny bulb, she could see a framed kakemono that she had noticed earlier in the day: the words "Pavilion of Timelessness," written in large characters and signed by one Keido. Sachiko looked at the words without knowing who Keido might be. A flicker of light moved across the next room.

To say that the meaning of this event is only the lustre of the commonplace in a seeming timelessness is to mistake Tanizaki's art for preciosity; the world is also a pavilion of splendor lovingly created in his rich details of experience, the past, and art. When Knopf issues his Dust of Snow (Sasame-Yuki), we shall appreciate more fully both his style, formed over the years on Poe, Baudelaire, and the Genji, and his great if often complexly Japanese humanism.

If Tanizaki persists in a fluid extension, Kawabata enters his characters so completely that he seems to disappear in a dramatic intensiveness reminiscent at times of Dostoevsky; but he remains completely impersonal, as even Saikaku does not. In "The Mole," for example, the drama is that of a woman whose life and relations with her family and husband have been shaped and changed by her habit of fingering a mole on her right shoulder. Her words are couched as a sort of diary meant for her husband's eyes and tell the history of the mole and what it has meant in her life. This is an incredible basis for a short story which conveys a woman's life and essential femininity with complete conviction, but it is just this quality of consuming immediacy without intimacy which Kawabata achieves so unsurpassedly.

Snow Country is far greater in sweep, technique, and style, however. "The Mole" has much of the intensity, but little else, of this novel and of the Saikaku tradition from which Kawabata derives his most fully realized art. One of Saikaku's chief subjects was human passion, and his technique an almost unbelievably imagistic style. Kawabata has the same haiku-like style of reduction to image become symbol which makes each detail verge upon the emblematic. There are three main characters to the story—Shimamura the sensualist, so precious that he is finally overwhelmed by his senses, Komako the geisha who lives by wasting her love on him, and the friend and rival, Yoko, who is a soft echo of Komako. The novel ends with Shimamura overcome by life: he is shocked into unconsciousness when Komako rushes from a burning building with Yoko's all but lifeless body in her arms.

Snow Country was written at different periods between 1934 and 1947, and its surpassing beauty grows out of this unhurried, considered art. The novel is divided into two parts, corresponding with Shimamura's two depicted visits to the snow country. At the beginning of the second part, Kawabata places Shimamura in Tokyo, shows the solicitude of his wife—thereby stressing by implication his culpability for infidelity—gets him back to the resort in the snow country, and suggests the time of year in two short sentences:

It was the egg-laying season for moths, Shimamura's wife told him as he left Tokyo, and he was not to leave his clothes hanging in the open. There were indeed moths at the inn.

This polished style glows in a perfected structural setting. The novel opens and closes with similar scenes. It begins with Shimamura on the train observing Yoko as she attends to the sick Yukio and savoring her with a vague pruriency which amounts to wondering who she is and whether he will possess her. The novel ends with him overcome by the sight of her mangled body and still unsure of her identity or of his relation to her. Part One begins and ends with Shimamura's impressions on a train journey. Part Two begins with the image of a moth, "a spot of pale green … oddly like the color of death," an anticipation of Yoko's dying state at the end of the novel—which is in turn parallel to the death of Yukio at the end of part one; and their deaths represent Shimamura's gradual spiritual dissolution in the course of the story. These are merely the most obvious of the many structural motifs in the novel, so that the question is rather one of its meaning than of its formal beauty.

Mr. Seidensticker writes in his Introduction that the theme of the novel is the impossibility of love in an earthly paradise, but I find this reduction unsatisfying. The novel is surely founded upon a contrast between Shimamura's precious sterility and Komako's immediate vitality. While on the train to visit the snow country, he bends and straightens the forefinger of his left hand, that part of him (symbolically?) which so sweetly, achingly remembers Komako. She is repeatedly bathing and tidying, is described in terms of images of light and red, and is shown in sudden impulses of action. What she represents is best revealed in the symbolism of the Milky Way at the end of the novel. Kawabata alludes to a haiku by Basho—

     High above the raging sea
     In an arch afar to Sado Island
     Streams the Milky Way—

Where the Sea of Japan is the same sea near the snow country. What the Milky Way symbolizes here and throughout is clear from four passages which I quote somewhat out of order. Shimamura sees the Milky Way come down

… just over there, to wrap the night earth in its naked embrace. There was a terrible voluptuousness about it. Shimamura fancied that his own small shadow was being cast up against it from the earth.

The Milky Way spread its skirts to be broken by the waves of the mountain, and, fanning out again in all its brilliant vastness higher in the sky, it left the mountain in a deeper darkness.

[Komako] seemed to have her long skirts in her hands, and as her arms waved the skirts rose and fell a little. He could feel the red over the starlit snow.

As he caught his footing [in stumbling toward the fire scene], his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

The last sentence ends the novel. Komako and the Milky Way are one; both represent the superior life and beauty which overcome the sterility of Shimamura: some sensualists "by aromatic splinters die," but he drowns in an excess of life. Komako tragically wastes her vitality on him, but tragic waste is also tragic exaltation in fullness of being. She has lived. Like Tanizaki, Kawabata affirms life, but life as passionate vitality rather than Tanizaki's patterns of tradition and subtle shades. These two great writers in the two important Japanese fictional traditions complement each other perfectly….

To begin with, it is extraordinary that these novels can affirm, even in translation, the importance of style—… Snow Country by a texture as rich as poetry. Second, these novels declare the function of taste in the Japanese tradition as a mode of apprehending and shaping experience. By taste I mean the ability to evaluate "the object as in itself it really is," but without Arnold's emphatic moral sense. But if taste may be opposed to moral preoccupation, there is indeed a moral passivity about these novels—and most Japanese art—which has troubled a Ruskin in the past and will continue to upset Westerners who desire authors to suggest moral judgments or create characters more completely good or bad.

The best and most characteristic Japanese fiction tends to accept, recreate, and esteem the esthetic particular and to avoid such issues of abstraction as conflicts between Good and Evil or Body and Soul (as opposed to good or evil protagonists). This leads to the third conclusion, that the Japanese go from the quasi-formal and particular realm of taste to what may be called metaphysical ultimates in ways different from ours. Our literature tends to alter or affirm life by making decisions in the way of poetic justice, but Japanese taste functions selectively and affirms by appreciation. The relation between this selective taste and metaphysical ultimates is established, I believe, in three ways which can only be named here: by a monistic treatment of materials, in which artistic judgment is exercised over a whole including man and nature, thought and action—poles for us but almost a single entity to a culture with a Buddhist heritage; second, by a narrative point of view which is at once closer to the materials and less omniscient—the air of "this is what things seem to have been"; and by a different concept of time which I can describe in brief only imagistically as the sensation for the reader of observing a traveler on a river-boat who observes now himself, now the shore, and now the river of flowing time—a merging of patterns of motion and stasis relative to each other. However, these random conclusions put an awkward intellectual superstructure upon many examples of fiction which often defy generalization and which certainly can be appreciated with far less self-consciousness. These stories are, after all, less the products of a foreign tradition than individual works of art which promise to give pleasure for many a reader and many a reading.