[The] early loss of [Kawabata's] parents seems responsible for the unique quality which one perceives in his life and work—a peculiar tension between life and death, detachment and attachment, the abstract and sensuous, whence derives a very special awareness of beauty bordering on sorrow….

[The] uniqueness of Kawabata's style is not its imitation of European modernism but rather its use of quintessentially Japanese poetic sensibility in the once prosaic genre of the novel. (p. 123)

Snow Country comprises a series of episodes, each of which evinces very concisely Kawabata's refined sensibility.

Despite [its] process of composition, Snow Country has a coherent structure. Shimamura, a married man with no particular profession, is attracted to two different types of women in the snow country of north-western Japan. Yōko is intangible or inaccessible to Shimamura, and in this respect an extension of Kawabata's famous Izu dancer (The Izu Dancer [Izu no Odoriko, 1926]). In contrast Komako, a snow country geisha, willingly gives herself to Shimamura. The past lives of the two women are quite different. Komako became a geisha to pay the medical expenses of her invalid fiancé, who is now looked after not by Komako but by Yōko. Shimamura lives in unresolved tension with the ironic distinctions between the tangible, fully embodied Komako and intangible, ethereal and, as it were, disembodied Yōko. (p. 124)

Shimamura views Yōko as an ethereal, intangible entity, but, objectively, she is very much flesh and blood…. Komako is certainly tangible to Shimamura, because they have a physical relation, but that does not make their relationship any less transient. Only by synthesising the paradoxical dualities of the tangible and intangible is Shimamura able to attain an enduring sense of beauty. As it is, he has only momentary glimpses of it in the snow country. Furthermore, the vision of beauty borders on death, as is illustrated by Yukio's death and finally Yōko's probable death in a fire. The fire which in the opening chapter is associated with beauty in the mirror image of Yōko thus becomes the fire that brings death.

Thousand Cranes (Senba Zuru, 1949–51) begins with two striking images, a birthmark and cranes…. These two key images reappear later in the novel, one ominous and the other beautiful, innocent and decent. (pp. 124-25)

One may wonder … why the thousand cranes are used as a key image and in fact as the title of the book. Had this work been composed in the carefree manner of many other Kawabata novels, it would probably have lacked any predetermined ending before starting its serialisation. But since the period during which Thousand Cranes was serialised was much shorter than that of Snow Country, Kawabata quite possibly from the start used the image of the thousand cranes to symbolise the innocence and decency embodied by Miss Inamura to contrast with the darkness that befalls [the protagonist] Kikuji. (pp. 125-26)

One may find in Thousand Cranes Kawabata's unique ability to represent the supra-sensory powers which are kept in balance with the sensory. The language he uses is compact and evocative like that of traditional haiku poetry. He gives hints and suggestions instead of stating everything in explicit and realistic terms. In brief, his language is symbolic. (p. 127)

The serial publication of The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no Oto, 1949–54) extended to over four years and partly overlapped with that of Thousand Cranes. Kawabata projects his central concerns into the character, Shingo, who is older than the author was himself at the time of writing the work (instead of being a younger man as in Thousand Cranes). Since it concentrates on the relations between fewer characters, Thousand Cranes is relatively limited in scope, whereas the introduction of more characters furnishes The Sound of the Mountain with the scope of a realistic novel. Yet Kawabata seems to aim not so much at describing the complicated relations of these characters in realistic terms as at representing the symbolic effects that derive from their relations. Just as Thousand Cranes centres round the consciousness of Kikuji, so does The Sound of the Mountain focus on the consciousness of Shingo. More important, the quasi-incestuous relations in Thousand Cranes are transformed into a platonic affair between Shingo and Kikuko, his daughter-in-law. Also, though Kawabata's treatment of the ethically immoral relations is, as it were, amoral, the platonic relationship between Shingo and Kikuko occurs under moral restraint and is set off against the immorality of Shingo's son, Shūichi. In other words, in Thousand Cranes the sins of the fathers are handed down to the son, whereas in The Sound of the Mountain the sins of the son are partly redeemed by the self-control of the father. (pp. 129-30)

In The Sound of the Mountain Kawabata seems to stress the concept of love that is handed down for numerous generations—not for only two generations as in Thousand Cranes. (p. 130)

Comparable to Kawabata's symbolic use of tea bowls in Thousand Cranes is his use of the Noh mask in The Sound of the Mountain. Shingo buys from the bereaved family of his friend two Noh masks representing boys' faces to which he feels unusually attracted. There are a number of paradoxical implications. The episode of Shingo's buying these masks immediately follows that of his dream about his embracing a young woman in Matsushima. The paradox about dreaming is that it arouses sensations rooted in the subconscious libido, yet it is nothing more than a substitute for an actual experience. A Noh mask, on the other hand, is a paradoxical synthesis, which at once represents human emotions and yet transcends the sensory. The irony of the present situation is that Shingo is attracted to the potentially sensuous in the supra-sensuous mask. Another irony is that although the mask is that of a boy, it is neither entirely masculine nor entirely feminine; it represents at once the angelically neuter and feminine beauty…. (p. 133)

In The House of Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru Bijo, 1960–1), written a decade afterwards, Kawabata presents the amorous life of an old man in a different light. Though he has long been impotent, the protagonist, an old man Eguchi, finds pleasure in a house where he is provided with a beautiful young girl naked and made insensible with drugs. One may easily find the setting analogous to that of Tanizaki's The Key, in which the elderly protagonist watches his wife naked and drugged with brandy. However, the difference is as obvious. In Tanizaki's work, the protagonist's motives and behaviour are geared towards amorous fulfilment; in Kawabata's Sleeping Beauties, fulfilment is out of reach for the old man who only indulges in recollections of his affairs in the past while lying beside the sleeping girl. External reality, therefore, becomes somehow disembodied for him. Even the boundary between life and death becomes indistinct, with his erotic vision verging on necrophilia, for indeed one of the girls sleeping beside him turns out to be dead the following morning. (pp. 135-36)