[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."]

Although Yasunari Kawabata has for years been considered the most distinguished member of the Japanese world of letters, the news of the selection of the sixty-nine-year-old author as the recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature—a surprise to readers throughout much of the world—was initially received with a sense of disbelief by his countrymen. The insight revealed in the citation by the Novel Committee, which praised the author for "his narrative mastership, which with great sensibility expressed the essence of the Japanese mind," seemed to mystify all but the most sensitive readers and critics, to whom the judgment seemed incredibly astute.

The typical Japanese reader tends, like readers elsewhere, to favor a well-paced narrative designed to quicken his interest in the story. He has been content to accept the high evaluation of Kawabata by professional critics and, rather than read his stories, has been inclined to enjoy them through the modified medium of the cinema. Indeed, Japanese moviemakers since the early fifties have produced some twenty film versions of his novels. The general reader in Japan has probably regarded Kawabata as a modernist rather than a traditionalist, for his stories are often difficult to apprehend fully, owing to the rich, allusive imagery, a suggestive quality that requires a matured sensibility of the reader, an elliptical sentence style, and a mode of story progression that often relies on linking through imagery rather than through contextual or sentence logic—a technique of the traditional renga or "linked verse." Many native readers are now avidly reading Kawabata novels to discover for themselves the traditional Japanese qualities that foreign readers were able to perceive through the reading of translations.

Snow Country (Yukiguni), Thousand Cranes (Semazuru) and The Old Capital (Koto) are the novels by which the Nobel Committee judged Kawabata's worth as a writer of fiction. These are novels in which the author's bent for the traditional is particularly evident, in depiction of outward forms of traditional culture (the tea ceremony, folk art, Shinto festivals, Buddhist temples) and the use of nature imagery for their cumulative, traditional lyrical implications, yet they do not fully represent the vast range of the author's creative capacity…. Translations of several of Kawabata's short stories have appeared in anthologies or magazines—among them, "The Izu Dancer" ("Izu no odoriko"), "The Mole" ("Hokuro no tegami") "Reencounter" ("Saikai"), and "Moon on the Water" ("Suigetsu").

In Japan, in the twentieth century, new literary trends were frequently set by coteries of writers who cooperated in the publication of literary journals. A particularly memorable year was 1924, when, in June, "Literary Battle Line" (Bungei Sensen) was founded as a monthly for Marxist writers and, in October, the publication of "Literary Era" (Bungei Jidai) was inaugurated by a group of young authors who were concerned primarily with the esthetics of literature. Yokomitsu Toshikazu (1898–1947) and Kawabata were the prime movers of the latter group, who were promptly labeled the "neoperceptionists" by the critic Kameo Chiba. In an essay, "The Birth of the Neoperceptionists" (in Seiki, November 1924), Chiba stated, "There is no doubt whatever that these writers, whom we might call the 'Literary Era' coterie, are sensually alert to diction, lyricism, and rhythm that are far fresher than anything ever before expressed by any of our sensitive artists." The expressive style of the neoperceptionists, literary historians tell us, was influenced considerably by the many startling examples of figurative language those young writers discovered in Paul Morand's Ouvert la nuit, which had appeared in Japanese translation that year.

Kawabata, by his own admission, has probably participated in the setting of more new trends than any other living writer. More important, however, has been his ability to experiment with new approaches and techniques and to adopt them into a larger embodiment which can be identified as a style uniquely his own; and his many years of experience, starting in his twenties, as a practicing critic have without doubt contributed much to the development of his own literary sensibility.

Although imprints of literary expressionism and psychological realism are rather clearly evident in Kawabata's stories, traditional Japanese themes have been more subtly infused into his writings. We may note coursing through all his major novels a sense of sorrow and loneliness, a recognition of an emotional and spiritual vacuity in man, and the recurring theme of the evanescence and meaninglessness of passion, even of temporal existence. The general tenor of the author's outlook has much in common with that of the Tale of Genji and diaries of the Late Classical Era (10th-12th century), with much of the prose of the Medieval Era (12th-16th century), and with traditional poetry. Because Kawabata avoids the explicit, his stories often seem veiled by vagueness, a quality that the native reader finds attractive. Because his writings contain so many diverse elements, they are at once subtle and complex, and they can be enjoyed for their sheer tonal and textural beauty.

Reading Kawabata's major works in chronological sequence, one may note a steady progression in the refinement of his technical mastery and a development of the ability to enter deeply into his characters. "The Izu Dancer," best known among his earliest writings, is a lyric description of a journey made by a high-school student, from the vicinity of Mount Fuji to the lower tip of Izu Peninsula, in the company of a troupe of traveling entertainers. Narrated in the first person and in a confessional vein, the short tale depicts a love that stirs the heart of the youth, whose eyes filter out the unsightly and create an idealized image of a lovely dancer who is about to blossom into womanhood. The inevitable parting and the lonely aftertaste remind him of the sorrow of having grown up an orphan, yet the memory of the fleeting encounter becomes a pleasurable one even while he continues to shed tears of regret. In composing this attractive tale, the author employed none of the techniques that were to characterize his later writings.

Kawabata's first full-length novel, The Crimson Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa kurenaidan), published in 1930, is considered the only noteworthy product of a short-lived movement for modernity and artistry that was launched by a loosely organized group of writers intent on stemming the tide of proletarian literature. This novel is in many respects antithetical to "The Izu Dancer." The Crimson Gang is a band of delinquents whose members are caught in a web of sex and violence. The setting is Asakusa, the colorful, raucous and sinful center of urban entertainment for the middle and lower classes of Tokyo. The author presents a panorama which unfolds in a series of rapidly changing scenes sketching various aspects of life in Asakusa. The ugly and evil are depicted along with the innocent and beautiful. Descriptions of the activities of the gang are woven into the panorama so that some semblance of unity is achieved. The author is a keenly sensitive observer, uninvolved in the story.

Snow Country, which was written sporadically between 1934 and 1937 and expanded into its present form after the war, is the first novel in which we find all the artistic elements, both modern and traditional, that have since characterized the distinctive style of Kawabata. Rich in imagery and symbolism, suggestive by association, the novel can be reexplored through repeated readings to new discoveries of meaning. The opening passage is arresting: "When the train came out of the long tunnel separating the provinces, it was in the snow country. The bottomless depth of the night was imbued with whiteness." Typical of the author's style is the delicacy of expression that verbalizes the profundity of a common winter scene, the subtle contrast between black sky and night-darkened snow.

The hero, Shimamura, studies the face of a girl reflected in the train window. The mirror filters out the ugly and the unpleasant; what remains for Shimamura to observe is only the beautiful, detached from those associations of sadness and pain that are evident in the totality of the image. As Shimamura concentrates on the reflected face, his time track shifts from the external to the "concrete" or internal psychological time; we are presented with a flashback, and then a flashback within a flashback, as the image evokes one recollection and then another in his mind.

Even though the point of view of Snow Country is essentially that of Shimamura, the author does not enter deeply into him. The novel can hardly be considered autobiographical. Shimamura is the observer of two women—the innocent Yoko, whose reflected image has fascinated him, and the sensual geisha Komako. Through his characterization of these two, the author describes the eternal sorrow of the Japanese woman as well as his admiration for her quality of forlornness and passivity. The vacuity in Shimamura's heart, however, may well be the vacuity in the heart of the author, or of an archetype of the modern Japanese male. The concluding paragraph presents the reader with an example of the author's elliptical sentence style: "The voice that shouted the half-crazed Komako Shimamura tried to get nearer to…." This English approximates the syntactic and idiomatic level of the original. A Japanese would reread and ponder it before he could grasp the intended meaning: "The voice that shouted was Komako's; Shimamura recognized it and tried to get nearer to the half-crazed Komako…." The concluding sentence, "The River of Heaven (the Milky Way) seemed to flow down with a roar into Shimamura," seems to be an expressionistic attempt to objectify an inexpressibly complex state of mind.

Thousand Cranes is a novel that exhibits many of the qualities of Snow Country, but we note a bolder approach to the topic of eroticism. The mode of fiction is that of imaginative storytelling, the author being nowhere evident. The relationship depicted is at best an unhealthy one—that between a young man and the women who had been mistresses to his late father. The motif is similar to that in Maupassant's "Hautot and His Son," but the eroticism in Thousand Cranes is more explicit, and is pervaded by a sense of sin and guilt which is absent from the French story. Kawabata adds to the complexity of incestuous relationship by involving the young hero in carnal association with the daughter of his father's former mistress. Here, as in Snow Country, we are afforded glimpses of traditional esthetic forms—graphic patterns, the tea ceremony, ceramics—often invested with symbolic suggestion. The instant transitions and fantastic leaps in time are techniques that anticipated those used many years later in films—recently in The Graduate, for instance.

Kawabata's finest novel in his unique modernist-traditionalist mode of fiction is Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto), published in 1954. Because the novel sheds much light on the immemorial Japanese household—an extended family—and on the often fast-and-loose world of Japanese business, we may say that it resembles the "novel of manners," which Japanese literary critics tend to regard with disdain. Sound of the Mountain, however, is essentially a psychological novel in which the process and effects of aging are drawn with remarkable sensitivity.

The narrative point of view is that of the sixty-year-old Ogata, who might be a fictional extension of the youthful "I" of "The Izu Dancer" and Shimamura of Snow Country. Like the shadowy hero of Snow Country, the gentle, aging Ogata is constantly observing and listening, absorbing all that happens about him, but, unlike Shimamura, he is keenly aware of his own reactions and gropes to identify the motives for his own thoughts and actions. His married son is involved in a sordid extramarital liaison with a war widow. Kikuko, the son's neglected wife, has a beauty that symbolizes purity and innocence—womanly qualities attractive to Ogata—and a mutual bond of sympathy and understanding draws the two close together. Kikuko shares Ogata's sensibilities, which his wife does not. The Western reader might be amused to note the corresponding levels of perceptivity assigned to Ogata, his daughter-in-law, and Mrs. Ogata, and to Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The fading but persistent yearning for youthful femininity in Ogata's unconscious is revealed to him occasionally in erotic dreams. In a moment of stupefying realization, Ogata identifies the faceless woman he has often embraced in dreams with his own daughter-in-law. The eroticism, however, is presented subtly, and the texture of Sound of the Mountain is softened considerably by frequent references to traditional esthetics.

Although, having completed Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata could have rested on his laurels, he was busily at work in 1954 writing The Lake (Mizuumi), a novel of stark psychological realism, infused with a dark lyricism which places it a fictional world apart from Sound of the Mountain and marks the beginning of yet another phase in the author's creative career. It is remarkable for its absence of references to traditional beauty. Instead, its emphasis is on symbolism, the bold use of interior monologue, the constantly shifting time track, and particularly the characterization of the hero: Gimpei's overpowering desire for beautiful women will never be fulfilled because of the ugliness of his feet—feet which he himself can regard only with morbid fascination, if not with abhorrence.

Another novel in a similar vein, House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo), depicting the behavioral and psychological manifestations of eroticism in the aging male, was published in 1961 and was immediately acclaimed as Kawabata's major work by a number of critics and authors. The novelist Yukio Mishima, among others, expressed regret that the Nobel Committee could not have read Sleeping Beauties to learn how the passing years had served to hone, rather than to dull, Kawabata's perceptivity and to enrich his creative and expressive capacities.

In The Old Capital (Koto), published in 1962, Kawabata reverted abruptly to the beauty and sadness he sees in youth and innocence. As in The Crimson Gang of Asakusa, the story itself is less important than the traditional beauty of Kyoto, which is woven into a soft brocade, attractive for its sheer textural elegance.

Thanks to the Nobel Committee, readers of English should soon be given access by our commercial publishers to translations of Kawabata novels which have won praise for their literary quality but have seldom been published in large editions in Japan. The reader might be forewarned, however, of one peculiarity of Kawabata's stories that is distinctly Japanese. Almost all of his stories represent a non-dramatic mode of fiction and remain unresolved. There is no explicit statement of what the tomorrow will bring to Shimamura, Ogata, Gimpei, "old" Eguchi of Sleeping Beauties, or the many women in his stories. Most Japanese readers enjoy the pathos born of such vagueness. We too might learn to enjoy pondering the eventual fates of characters in novels. Their lives are no less real than our own. No one, after all, lives quite happily or unhappily ever after.