SOURCE: "Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972): Tradition versus Modernity," in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 375-79.

[In the following essay, DeVere Brown discusses how Kawabata focused on traditional culture in his major works.]

Yasunari Kawabata is Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature. The prize, once monopolized by Western writers, was given to a Japanese for the first time in 1968. 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. The paradox is that Kawabata, who seems to have been recognized for Japan's 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. The historian would do better to look to Kawabata's contemporaries such as Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, who wrote the classic novel of the Japanese family The Makioka Sisters, or even Yukio Mishima, who recreated both the world of the Taisho elites (in Spring Snow) and that of the right-wing patriots of the early Showa era (in Runaway Horses). 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 Seidensticker has asserted that Kawabata was much like the men he wrote about, in contrast to Tanizaki, who created protagonists very different from himself. The young student depicted in "The Izu Dancer" 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. The Tokyo dilettante Shimamura who is the protagonist of Snow Country, with his half-baked 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. The 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. 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 economy.

The two greatest translators and critics of Japanese literature in the West, Edward Seidensticker and Donald Keene, have both written about Kawabata. It was Seidensticker who translated the two finest Kawabata works, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, into English—thereby enhancing his prospects for the Nobel—and who accompanied him to Stockholm for acceptance of the prize, in the role of interpreter. Together the two critics/translators have nurtured the reputation in the West of this most Japanese of contemporary writers. As Keene notes, "Kawabata was unquestionably a modern man, and his works dealt exclusively with the lives of contemporaries, but the Nobel Prize Committee honored him because of the special affinities his works revealed with Japanese traditions."

Kawabata was born in the mercantile city of Osaka in 1899, orphaned at the age of two, and deprived even of his grandfather in 1914, living a lonely life in school dormitories until he graduated from the English Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1920. A degree from the Japanese Literature Department of the same university followed in 1924. The great editor (and novelist) Kan Kikuchi, founder of the literary monthly Bungei Shunju, launched Kawabata's career with the publication of "The Izu Dancer" in 1926. By the time of the appearance of his masterpiece, Snow Country, in 1935, he was a presence in the world of Japanese letters. A look at his six major novels will help us discern his point of view toward this modern world into which he was propelled.

Snow Country, in its first published form, appeared during the era of Showa militarism, yet the reader will learn nothing of the national crisis or of governmental efforts at national spiritual mobilization from it. The 1957 movie version of the novel, starring Keiko Kishi, was fleshed out with contemptuous remarks about the young officers who murdered a senior bureaucratic general in Tokyo and with considerable asperity regarding corrupt provincial politicians, but there is no such preaching in the novel which has come down to us.

Modernity meets the reader in the very first sentence, however, a sentence denominated the most famous in all Japanese literature: "When the train emerged from the long tunnel at the provincial boundary, they were in the snow country." Shortly afterward, "The train stopped at the signalling station." Snowplows are waiting at another point, and we learn that an electric avalanche system has been installed at the entrances to the tunnel. Kawabata may have implicitly accepted the steam train as part and parcel of traditional Japan, not separate from it. Here he treats it poetically: "The train moved off in the distance, its echo fading into a sound of the night wind" as it returned to Tokyo. A famous image, the Light in the Window, utilizes the fogged-over window of the passenger car to intersect the light in the distance with the beautiful young Yoko's eye in reflection. Modern transportation facilitates traditional esthetic expression; there is no conflict between the two.

The railway has recently reached the hot-springs resort, which seems to be modeled on Tazawa in Akita prefecture. The telegraph is also available in this remote place, and Shimamura once hurries off to the post office to wire a request for money before it closes. Radios bring news of a disastrous snow avalanche (but not of tense Tokyo politics, so far as we know). A statement on the impact of the West on Japanese health appears indirectly through the tale of the music teacher's son, who has returned home from Tokyo suffering from "intestinal tuberculosis." This disease from the West in its deadly form was the scourge of Japan before antibiotics. Komako, the country geisha, goes to work at her profession to pay the young man's medical bills—out of love or out of some kind of obligation to his mother. The reason is unclear.

People in the back country include a White Russian refugee woman, here a peddler. Japanese rustic types in the background include small shopkeepers and even farmers at the rice harvest. The sway of the farm girl's hips as she throws the rice bundles up to a man for placement on the drying racks commands the attention of this connoisseur of women as much as the harvest itself.

Beauty, not modernity, is Kawabata's theme in Snow Country, the ambience of the hot-springs resort, a place of special pleasure to the Japanese. The snow-covered mountains and the village streets piled high with snow up to the second story of buildings form another dimension of Japan the beautiful; but it is the Japanese woman who occupies stage center here, specifically Komako, who plays the samisen and sings the traditional "Dark Hair." She has drawn Shimamura away from Tokyo. Her younger friend and possible rival in love, Yoko, possesses "a clear voice, so beautiful it was almost sad." The Light in the Window illuminates Yoko's eye, just as the Mirror in the Morning reflects the beauty of Komako's rouged face framed by the reflection of falling snowflakes.

The Master of Go is a celebration of a different aspect of Japanese tradition, unique to Japan as it has evolved and one favored by feudal warriors because of its simulation of the battlefield. This work is Kawabata's nonfiction novel, for essentially it is the story of a 1938 championship match which he covered as a newspaper reporter. Shusai, the Master, defends his title "at the advanced age of sixty-four," using the deliberate, traditional style of play against an aggressive young competitor half his age who wins by rapid, disconcerting moves near the end of the match. Death for the Master, and perhaps the demise of a tradition, follows the loss. The match occurred in 1938, at the height of Showa militarism; publication of the novel began during the Pacific War in 1942, but the definitive final version did not appear until 1954, after the American Occupation was over. Nothing of militarism or war attends the match as retold in the novel, even though Go was the game of early-day samurai militarists. The book is as divorced from political or social concerns as any work of literature could be. Seidensticker has described it as an elegy for a great tradition which had fallen just as had Japan in war, a work confined to the game, the psychology of the contestants, and the superbly beautiful settings in which play was conducted, most often at inns in hot-springs resorts.

The Naraya in Miyanoshita is an ideal setting for contemplation of the next move by Go competitors. The inn is quiet as well as scenic, unlike the inn by the waterfall which triggered the Master's insomnia, and it commands a view of the nearby mist-covered mountains. Testimonials to the inn's excellence come in the form of a memorial stone to the Emperor Meiji, who once stayed there, and a framed inscription by the early nineteenth-century historian Sanyo Rai, a revolutionary nationalist. (I have seen another framed inscription at the Naraya by the Meiji statesman Takayoshi Kido, who stayed there in 1876; it was shown to me by the elderly proprietress whose family has owned the inn for more than a century. Kido called the Naraya the best inn in Miyanoshita. An American vice-president who wanted to stay at a traditional inn was slated to come there, said the proud proprietress, but a rail strike prevented it; Spiro Agnew sent an autographed photograph instead. Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, who did stay there, told her that he would like to take the scenic landscape back to America with him.) Writing during the war era, Kawabata chose to describe not battle deaths in China or political crises in Tokyo, but only the national cultural treasure, a game of Go, played out quietly in the rustic simplicity of a hot-springs inn.

Thousand Cranes is a product of the American Occupation period. The tea ceremony is the element of tradition and beauty featured in this moving novel, one of the three masterworks cited by the Nobel Prize Committee. In point of fact, the work is a lament for the decline of the ceremony into vulgarization and commercialism. Anyone might drop in on Chikako Kurimoto's weekly public demonstrations. "The other day I even had some Americans," she admits. The title was inspired by the kerchief with the thousand-cranes pattern carried to a tea ceremony by a Miss Inamura, who has been proposed as a bride for Kikuji Mitani, the protagonist. Chikako, a mistress to his father, regards the meeting as a miai. No marriage occurs, but the tangled personal relationships of his late father, the latter's mistress, and the son unfold. The war was still a fresh and unpleasant memory when this book was written, and Fumiko, daughter of one of the mistresses, was considered courageous because she "went to the country for rice, even during the raids."

The tea vessels are described in loving detail by Kawabata in Thousand Cranes and take on personalities of their own, especially the four-hundred-year-old Shino Bowl which seems to have a trace of the lipstick of the late Mrs. Ota. One American reviewer, in fact, believed the main character of the novel was that tea bowl. It is possessed with a curse, and only when Fumiko breaks the vessel is she freed from the curse and from the Mitani family. At a time when Japanese civilization itself seemed threatened under the American Occupation, Kawabata made his statement on behalf of the Way of Tea and the proper tea vessels, preserving in literature that indispensable part of Japan's past.

The Sound of the Mountain, also from the period of the American Occupation, celebrates the artistic mask of the No theater which old Shingo has begun to study with such enthusiasm as death nears. "Clouding" means dropping the mask to indicate sadness; "shining" means raising it to indicate joy, for example. The beauty of the mask in use is so great it makes him cry. It is the prospect of death which turns his attention to the beautiful aspects of Japan. Shingo's preoccupation with death began during the war, and he believes that the sound of the mountain is a forewarning. "I heard the mountain rumbling," he once remarks as he opens the shutters. If Shingo is Kawabata's alter ego, then the author may have meant to face up to the prospect of personal physical death here as well as the death of a civilization. One classmate of Shingo has gone to his death, ridiculed by others because he was tormented continually by his wife; another has died in the arms of his young mistress at a hot-springs resort. As the visages of those deceased friends appear in his dreams, Shingo regrets that he will never climb Mount Fuji as death beckons, and also that he has never seen Matsushima, one of the Three Great Sights of Japan, though he dreams of those pine covered islets.

Shingo is very attached to his young daughter-in-law Kikuko, whose husband has taken up with a mistress in the Hongo section of Tokyo. The Sound of the Mountain is a fuller, more complete story than Kawabata's earlier works, and we are treated to an exposition of the tangled relationships of the three generations of Shingo's family. The novel does for the postwar family what Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters did for the traditional prewar extended family, but inevitably in sparer detail. Shingo and his son Shuichi are commuters, riding the train in daily to their Tokyo office from North Kamakura, the seaside resort which is for them a remote suburb of the Tokyo metropolis. The American Occupation is a part of their lives but is barely hinted at. At the fishmonger's Shingo observes some "prostitutes of the new sort," their "bare backs, cloth shoes, and good figures" revealing that they cater to American military men.

The Old Capital provides a shift of locale to Kyoto, the home of artistic craft goods. The story of twin girls separated at birth and later reunited as young women seems incidental to the main task of presenting to the reader the old capital in all its traditional glory. Kyoto was the one great Japanese urban center untouched by the American air raids of the Pacific War. The Kiyomizu Temple at sunset, Mount Daimonji in bloom with colorful flowers, and the Heian Shrine at festival time are all described in loving detail. At the shrine's small pool, "cherry blossoms and pines seemed to tremble in the pond as goldfish surfaced." As Seidensticker has noted, Kawabata wanted to set down the beauty of the old city, Japan's capital from 794 to 1868, before it disappeared forever.

The cedars of Kitayama, north of the city, where the more rustic of the twins lives, provided wood of uniform size for teahouses in Tokyo and Kyushu. The cedars in their straight rows conjure up "the elegant air of the tea ceremony," but it is the silk-weaving business in small shops which trained apprentices that is important, and threatened. The obi, the kimono sash, should be designed to reflect the personality of the individual wearer. Industrialization has threatened all that. A portent of things to come is the Western-style, four-story factory, newly opened and capable of turning out five hundred obi per day. "Some home businesses like mine with hand looms will probably disappear within twenty or thirty years," a shopkeeper laments. Kawabata wrote at the beginning of the Economic Miracle. Doubtless small home work-shops, facing pressure from a government committed to economic modernization, were phased out much sooner than the shopkeeper anticipated.

The Americans have come to Kyoto, and the city is the worse for their presence. "These are the kind of customers who buy portable radios," notes a boy who needs extra work as his family's silk-cloth business declines, leading him to hire out as a guide. "They're American women staying at the Miyako Hotel." Another replies, "Portable radios or silks—a dollar is a dollar." Kawabata's feelings are obviously the opposite, that the city should be uncontaminated with Americans and their lack of taste. European judges may have elevated this work to a higher level than deserved in making it one of the three books on which the Nobel selection was based, believes Keene, but seemingly did so out of pleasure at Kawabata's re-creation of the Old Japan "unaffected by the blight of Americanization," which had its critics in Europe at the same time.

Beauty and Sadness likewise glorifies Kyoto in the early days of the Economic Miracle. Toshio Oki, a novelist who posts his daily installment to the newspaper at North Kamakura Station, has gone to Kyoto to hear the tolling of the New Year's bells at the Chionin Temple, 108 strokes at midnight. Previously he had only listened to this Buddhist ceremony on the radio. It is in fact a woman, Otoko Ueno, his mistress of two decades earlier, who has drawn him to the city. He last saw her in Tokyo, where an abortion was performed in a sleazy, remote suburb. Taken to Kyoto to live by her mother, Otoko has now become an accomplished artist in the traditional fashion. Her devious, vengeful, but beautiful young female protégée is sent to receive Oki and later makes contact with him back in Kamakura, bringing along her own avant-garde paintings of the Shizuoka tea fields; these tea fields represent a bad memory to her teacher Otoko, who had observed them as she fled Tokyo in disgrace. The book is a vehicle for Kawabata's comments on painting, both traditional Japanese and European, but it is also another tour of Kyoto and its classic sights: the Ryoanji, a garden which was "almost too famous, though it may be said to embody the very essence of Zen aesthetics," and the Moss Garden, another dry landscape which the priest Muso had laid out in 1939. The stone lanterns put in place by the abbot seem to have always been there.

There was by now the familiar complaint about the Americans and modernity. Those annoying Americans occupy a marginal position in Beauty and Sadness. The novelist-protagonist watches them photograph Mount Fuji from the train to Kyoto when the sacred mountain is still barely visible and then lose interest by the time the train nears the mountain in all its glory. The Americans' luggage includes a large leopard-skin handbag which is the epitome of bad taste, and American children chatter in a foreign language in the hall-ways of the novelist's Kyoto hotel, making life miserable.

Still, Kyoto is beautiful in spite of the disagreeable American presence: "Compared with Tokyo, Kyoto was such a small intimate city that the Western Hills are close at hand. As the writer gazed a translucent pale gold cloud above the hills turned a chilly ashen color, and it was evening." Kawabata's fascination with trains continues: "From somewhere off in the Western Hills came a plaintive, lingering whistle of a train entering … a tunnel"; as the novelist's train makes its way back to Tokyo, "the rails glinted crimson far into the distance in the rays of the setting sun." Trains were a part of Kawabata's old-fashioned world. Typewriters were not; neither were printing presses. The Tale of Genji makes an entirely different impression on Oki when he reads it in "handsome old block-printed" characters rather than in the mechanically printed version; and he has taken to reading Saikaku, the writer of stories about bawdy merchants, in contemporary "seventeenth-century facsimiles."

The old ways were better, Kawabata seems to say here and in the earlier novels. He was a cultural nationalist who sought to preserve the world of tradition in novels before those traditions vanished forever. It is doubtful that he was a true ultranationalist in the political sense during the Pacific War. He was "esteemed by the militarists, even though he had done nothing to ingratiate himself," notes Donald Keene. He did such things as visit the Kamikaze pilots of the Special Attack Force in Kagoshima and stayed a month, but he did not lament the lost war much. Defeat "actually brought freedom of the spirit and the sense of what it means to live in peace," he said.

Between defeat in 1945 and his death in 1972 Kawabata wrote to preserve the world of tradition. It was the world of hot-springs resorts and old-fashioned compliant Japanese beauties who played the samisen and sang "Dark Hair," of the tea ceremony and its ancient artistic vessels, of No masks and all that they symbolized, of the game of Go and its traditions, and above all of the old capital of Kyoto, whose temples and gardens had emerged from the war intact. Kawabata wrote about small shopkeepers, craftsmen, and silk traders in the export business. He seemed only remotely aware of the big bankers and large industrialists, and of the Liberal-Democratic Party politicians who were the movers and shakers of the New Japan (in his novels at least, though he supported one of them for governor of Tokyo in 1972). The Americans, important though they may have been to the remaking of Japan, inhabit only the fringe of his novels, at most tourists with debased tastes or low-class soldiers in pursuit of Japanese prostitutes. Businessmen and politicians dominated the emerging Japanese superstate, but their world held little interest for Kawabata. The modern world provides merely a dim, mostly unseen context in his novels for the admirable people and culture rooted in Old Japan.