[In the excerpt below, Masao examines Kawabata's early experimentation with European avant-garde aesthetics in several short stories. The critic finds "The Izu Dancer, " however, a tradition-based piece that provides an "alternative to the eccentric internationalism of [Kawabata's] 'modernist⁹stories."]

Early in his career Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) was a member of the Neo-Perceptionist school (Shin Kankaku Ha). The existence of this group, as a part of Japanese literary history, is not so interesting or important in itself: its creed, like those of the Naturalists, the Anti-Naturalists, and other groups, derives from imported avant-garde European manifestoes, and, like most, suffers from poor digestion of same. Thrown into their modernist mélanges are bits and dollops of Paul Morand, Andreyev, Croce, Bergson, futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, symbolism, structuralism, realism, Strindberg, Swinburne, Hauptmann, Romain Rolland, Schnitzler, lord Dunsany, Wilde, lady Gregory, and a lot else—all assembled, presumably, to spice the domestic literary staples, but in fact to preserve a conservative aesthetic against the encroaching Marxists. Most of its members are now forgotten (with the exception of Yokomitsu Riichi, who, however, became a very different sort of writer later on), and Kawabata's position in the group was not a dominant one. Nonetheless, when looked at as a serious attempt at enlarging the novelistic possibilities of the Japanese language, the modernist practices of the group must be recognized as vital in the formation of Kawabata's style.

Kawabata's main contribution to the group's platform, "The New Tendency of the Avant-Garde Writers" (Shinshin Sakka no Shinkeikō Kaisetsu), published in 1925, makes a plea for the new—new perception, new expression, and new style—and strongly emphasizes the importance of sense perception for the novelist. While not being very precise in his "epistemology of expressionism," and dodging most of the hard problems of his theme, Kawabata does spell out the need for a new language to replace the existing "lifeless, objective narrative language." "Dadaist," "Freudian," "free associative," "subjective, intuitive, and sensuous" expression—all such terms are left undefined, but in the context of his discussion they do suggest a coherent feeling for a certain style. He would have a language for the novel that would reflect immediately the inchoate state of a man's thoughts, feelings, and sensory experience. Instead of syntactically complete sentences, the characters (or the narrator) ought to be allowed to speak sometimes in fragments, which will not only suggest more accurately the author's view of the particular situation but will give the reader a fuller picture of the characters and their surroundings. In such a language, the seer is not yet separated from the seen, the speaker from the spoken. To illustrate his point, Kawabata provides a sample sentence or two ("My eyes were red roses" as preferable to "My eyes saw red roses"), but unfortunately this tends to muddle the discussion more than clarify it. . . .

The imprint of Neo-Perceptionism on Kawabata continues strong in those works written over the ten years following this "modernist" manifesto. Stories and longer works like "The Ghost of the Rose" ("Bara no Yūrei," 1927), The Red Gang of Asakusa (Asakusa Kurenai-Dan, 1929-30), "Needle and Glass and Fog" ("Hari to Garasu to Kiri," 1930), and "The Crystal Fantasy" ("Suishō Gensō," 1931), to mention only a few, are all marked by boldly experimental features. The deformation of idioms, such as in the sentence "an illness entered the core of the body" in "Needle and Glass and Fog"; a long interior monologue, very much after Molly Bloom's, in "The Crystal Fantasy"; the predominantly nominal and asyntactic construction of The Red Gang of Asakusa; the hundred miniature "novels" later collected into one volume as The Palm-Sized Stories (Tmagokoro no Shōsetsu, 1922-50)—these are the most conspicuous examples. Determinedly "modern" too are their themes and settings. The characters are typically urban "new types," whose life style is self-consciously "Western." The wife in "The Crystal Fantasy," for example, living in a "Western" room with "Western" furniture, sits at her dressing table polishing her nails and looking out on her greenhouse. Her stream of consciousness could be that of a European woman, since, with the exception of one mention each of Tokyo, a Japanese writer, and a Japanese swimmer in the strange catalogue of items several pages long, the story is quite cosmopolitan in its references.

I do not mean, of course, that in these experiments Kawabata succeeds in creating anything like the cosmopolitan as a type of person recognizable across all linguistic and cultural borders. The notion of a cosmopolitan is itself quite specific to modern Western culture. The fact is, in the complexion of their feelings and emotions his characters are unmistakably Japanese. "The Crystal Fantasy," for instance, puts the cosmopolitan wife in the context of a tension between her medical and scientific interests and her sexual fantasies—in itself an unlikely situation for a Japanese woman of the time—and yet her relationship to her husband at once defines her as Japanese. There is a very uncomfortable gap in the work between its intellectual intention and its actualization by a sensibility formed out of the traditional expectation and response. Whatever stylistic feat Neo-Perceptionism may have achieved here, one realizes, it is not so much surrealistic in effect as haiku-like, still imbued as it is with the age-old associations and conventions despite its being set in a modern frame of reference. Natsume Sōseki undoubtedly knew this a generation before, and Kawabata, too, came to know it as he matured. For all its youthful wrongheaded theorizing, Neo-Perceptionism taught Kawabata a great deal about the possibilities of Japanese for prose fiction. . . .

One of Kawabata's earliest and least experimental stories, "The Izu Dancer" ("Izu no Odoriko," 1926), stands up better than his modernist attempts. like Pillow of Grass, "The Izu Dancer" is a first-person story of a trip to the country. Unlike the Sōseki story, however, the voice here is lyrical throughout, and not mediated either by irony or by manipulation of time between the events and the telling. The student-narrator's experience is set in the fresh provincial scene by means of an evocative, slightly nostalgic language which is neither elaborate nor learned. While Pillow of Grass is a complex experiment in the narrative sequence, "The Izu Dancer" has the forthright appearance of a single unadorned episode. There is more quiet understatement and less surprise. And, finally, as against Sōseki's hero who moves from uninvolvement toward greater involvement, Kawabata's moves in the other direction, toward less involvement.

The student is attracted to a girl in a traveling family of dancer-entertainers whom he meets while on vacation, but he does not exactly know what he wants from the encounter. Right away, he realizes he is tormented with the thought of her "entertaining" her clients. Next morning, however, as a fierce storm clears, he sees her nude in the outdoor bath:

One small figure ran out into the sunlight and stood for a moment at the edge of the platform calling something to us, arms raised as though for a plunge into the river. It was the little dancer. I looked at her, at the young legs, at the sculptured white body, and suddenly a draught of fresh water seemed to wash over my heart. I laughed happily. She was a child, a mere child, a child who could run out naked into the sun and stand there on her tiptoes in her delight at seeing a friend. I laughed on, a soft, happy laugh. It was as though a layer of dust had been cleared from my head. And I laughed on and on. It was because of her too-rich hair that she had seemed older, and because she was dressed like a girl of fifteen or sixteen. I had made an extraordinary mistake indeed.

No longer threatened by the need to discover and test his sexuality, the "I" really comes to love the girl as they roam from one mountain village to another in the company of her family. She responds to his affection, and they discover very gentle and tender feelings for each other. The story ends as they part and the young man returns to school.

There are several episodes which are seemingly unrelated to the main line of the story. One is toward the end where another boy, bound for Tokyo to take his high school entrance exams, consoles the narrator for his loss. The hero's initiation is effectively postponed and in a sense universalized as he goes to sleep "warmed by the boy beside [him]," who of course faces his own initiation into school life away from his family.

The avoidance of direct total involvement in heterosexual love is not unique to this story, since most of Kawabata's central man-woman relationships do not build upon the mutual full engagement of two people. Frequently, his women are remote and virginal—"pure" as he sometimes calls them—and, whatever the author's psychological determinants for this may be, there is a kind of aching persistent eroticism permeating his later novels which is inseparable from the wistful and often intense longing that typically marks Kawabata's male characters.

The atmosphere of freshness and innocence enveloping "The Izu Dancer" comes, I think, from Kawabata's utterly simple language which sets the experience down among the trees and clean air and wet grass of a country resort. In contrast to the urban environments of his Neo-Perceptionist works, the setting of this story recalls the province of the traditional haiku. There is also the circumstance that Kawabata, instead of explaining the characters' thoughts and feelings, merely suggests them by mentioning objects which, in a country setting, are certain to reverberate with tangible, if not identifiable, emotions.

It was after midnight when I left their inn. The girls saw me to the door, and the little dancer turned my sandals so that I could step into them without twisting. She leaned out and gazed up at the clear sky. "Ah, the moon is up."

Here Kawabata, as he chisels this plain, clear prose reaching back to the old tradition, appears determined to find some alternative to the eccentric internationalism of his "modernist" stories.