[In the following review, Lowitz discusses the opposing forces of tradition and modernity in Kawabata's The Old Capital.]

Though Yasunari Kawabata, the only Japanese novelist to receive the Nobel Prize, is best known for the novels Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, readers will find The Old Capital a welcome addition to the English-language works of Japan's great elegiac writer. Written in 1961, The Old Capital was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee, but has only now been translated into English by a doctoral student, J. Martin Holman, at Berkeley. The respectable translation embues the story with a stillness that allows the beauty of the language to surface while the mysteries of the character's lives open and close like a succession of folding screens.

The Old Capital takes place in Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital which struggles to keep its identity while incorporating influences from the West. The difficulties of such an adjustment are a cause for spiritual angst in the characters of the story, as they watch the familiar fabric of their kimonos turn into synthetic material and see their ancient summer festival become a crowded tourist's spectacle.

Chieko Sada is the novel's beautiful twenty-year-old protagonist who discovers that the people she has called her parents for twenty years are not her real parents, and that (like Kawabata himself) she is an orphan. This discovery is compounded by the chance meeting of her twin, Naeko, whom she never knew existed. Naeko lives in a forest village nearby, and has come to Kyoto to seek out her sister. The two become mirrors for each other and what each represents: country and city, tradition and change. Everything in the book has a counterpart and soon the dichotomy of opposing forces stretches into art vs. imitation, family-run business vs. industry, man-made forests vs. natural growth, all of which reverberate the concerns of modern Japan.

Chieko's father is a kimono merchant who struggles to keep the old way but soon the influence of Western artists like Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall find their way into his designs. His daughter is courted by two men, one a designer who handlooms obi (the thick sash worn around the kimono) and the other a son of a wealthy textile wholesaler.

Since every character has an alter ego, the central conflict in the novel becomes not how the twain shall meet, but whether a meeting is ever possible. Chieko looks at two violets and asks "Do the upper and lower violets ever meet? Do they know each other?… What could it mean that the violets 'meet' or 'know' one another?"

Kawabata's affinity for nature permeates the text and provides an odd sense of balance, as if somehow the Seasons are the only predictable, comfortable element of change. A lightning storm accentuates Chieko and Naeko's meeting: violets grow side by side as they do, close yet distant; and snow falls when they meet for the last time.

Kawabata once wished to be a painter, and his impressionistic writing often casts chiaroscuro patterns to play out the contrast of the characters. There are writers who see the similarities in the world, writers who see the differences. Kawabata sees them both at the same moment and draws into focus the tension between the two.

In each of Kawabata's novels there is a symbol which provides a metaphor for the character's plight. In Thousand Cranes, the tea bowl is used to symbolize the containment of dark histories. In Snow Country it is the Noh mask which serves to illustrate the denial of emotions and the paradoxical mask which makes expression possible. In The Old Capital it is the obi sash which symbolizes the transcendent moment when the worlds of past and present, East and West, young and old, are tied together. This sash becomes the landscape of synthesis, which Kawabata artfully ties only to finally untie, leaving the reader to make his own connections.