Authors of Japan: Yasunari Kawabata

By Tom Wilkinson-Gamble

The first, and currently only one of two, Japanese nationals to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is one of the original so-called ‘Big Three’ of Japanese literature. For such a successful writer, the main themes that define his work can be hard to pin down. Having lived through the second half of the Meiji, the entirety of the Taisho era and the first forty years of the Showa era, and therefore through countless important historical events, Kawabata's work was generally apolitical. Even after the Second World War, apart from a few references to it happening, his work remained generally unaffected, especially when compared to his protégé, Yukio Mishima, whose life was greatly impacted by his experience of the war. Though some of his works can feel slightly dream-like and strange when taken at face value, his work generally, apart from one exception, stays away from the supernatural and surreal. The dichotomy between the modern and the traditional, though present, is far less evident than it was in the works of other writers, again, especially when compared to Mishima.

How, then, can we define Kawabata’s work? The answer might lie in his youth. Born into a well-to-do family in Osaka in 1899, Kawabata’s early life was certainly a sad one. Both of his parents passed away by the time he was four, and his sister and paternal grandparents had also died less than ten years later. With almost all of his close family gone, Kawabata was to be heartbroken once more when his engagement to Hatsuyo Ito was broken off due to unforeseen complications. This distance, therefore, both physical and emotional, that he experienced when he was younger, and the impact this distance has on people’s relationships, might be best lens with which to view Kawabata’s work. 

After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924, Kawabata worked as a journalist and was involved in literary magazines and journals such as Hiroshi Kikuchi’s Bungei Shunju and Riichi Yokomitsu’s Bungei Jidai. Kawabata’s first major success, The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926), follows a lonely and melancholic student from Tokyo who meets a group of traveling musicians and falls in love with one of them, the young girl Kaoru. Kaoru’s innocent and child-like antics bring the narrator, a stand-in for Kawabata himself, out of his melancholia and he returns to Tokyo refreshed and in higher spirits. The novel contains two themes, both of which revolve around how the narrator cures his depression. At the start of the novel, the narrator is lonely and miserable, but after his interaction with the musicians, particularly with the young Kaoru, he returns to Tokyo refreshed. It is his time with the musicians that cures his depression, thereby showing the importance, to Kawabata, of social interaction, something which he was personally lacking in his youth. It is worth stressing that the student leaves Tokyo, a huge sprawling industrial city, for Shimoda in the far more rural land of the Izu Peninsula. This leads back to a theme common in the writings of almost every Japanese writer of the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras; the constant dichotomy of the modern and the traditional. Does swapping the smoke and factories of Tokyo for the cool sea breeze and mountains of Izu parallel the misery of the narrator and the youthful innocent of Kaoru? 

Both of these themes are appears again in another of Kawabata’s work. In my personal opinion, Snow Country (1948) might be one of the greatest pieces of Japanese literature ever written and its opening scene provides one of the clearest example of the modern-traditional dichotomy. The novel starts late at night with the nouveau riche Shimamura making his way by train through the dark snow-covered mountains of Niigata to the remote onsen town of Yuzawa. The imagery of the industrial coal-powered steam train making its way through the dark and frozen land of Tohoku, a heart land of traditionalism, seems to reverse the accepted narrative of ‘old good, new bad’. The warmth and light of the train, the new, cutting its way through the cold and dark mountains, the old. Though it would be foolish to think that Kawabata’ is attempting to fully reverse this accepted point of view. As the novel progresses, Shimura’s complex relationship with Komako, one of the Geisha of the onsen, possibly mirrors Japanese society’s complex relationship with the balance of the modern and the traditional. Shimura and Komako is comparable to the unnamed narrator and Kaoru, though is not the same. As for the narrator and Kaoru, though they are not allowed to pursue each other romantically, their relationship is clearly defined, and their story ends far more positively, whereas Shimura and Komako’s relationship is remains ambiguous, leaving room for conflict. Their story ends with a fire in the town in which one of the passengers on the train, Yoko, perishes. With Shimura and Komako’s relationship still not clearly defined, the end comes in a terrible tragedy and loss of life, possibly foreshadowing Japan’s own final confrontation with the modern against the traditional and the terrible sorrows of war that conflict brings. 

In 1938, the legendary former Go player Hon'inbō Shūsai came out of retirement to play the then up-and-coming prodigy Minoru Kitani. At the time, Kawabata was working as a journalist and covered the game for the Mainichi Shinbun. More than 15 years later, Kawabata adapted a semi-fictionalised version of the game into the novel The Master of Go (1954). On the surface, the novel appears to be nothing than a piece of historical fiction, retailing the epic struggle between an aging grand-master against a young prodigy looking to carve out his own legacy in the world of Go. The American historian and translator Edward Seidensticker thought differently. Seidensticker argued that Kawabata used the game as an allegory for the war between Japan and the West, particularly with the United States. Shūsai representing traditional culture, stood in for Japan, whilst Kitani filled in as the US, a new emerging power posing a threat to the established Empire. Kawabata’s last reference to the modern-traditional dichotomy appeared in the novel The Old Capital (1962). 

Many of Kawabata’s novels concern the idea of love; Thousand Cranes (1952), The Sound of the Mountain (1954), The Lake (1954), The Dandelion (1964) and Beauty and Sadness (1965). But there are two in particular that deserve to be discussed in further detail. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) follows the narrator’s journey through the former entertainment district of Asakusa in Tokyo. Throughout his time there, the narrator meets numerous young prostitutes and brothel workers who explain their way of life and the inner machinations of Tokyo’s dark underbelly. Unlike Kawabata’s other works on love, Asakusa is far more overtly sexual. Although, this is not the only time Kawabata did this. The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) follows an old man, Eguchi, who visits a hotel where customers can pay to sleep next to naked girls but are forbidden to engage in sexual activity with them. It is possible that Eguchi is a stand in for Kawabata and that the house represents Kawabata’s inability to truly connect with others; constantly surrounded by people but never able to truly commit himself to them. 

Unfortunately, like seemingly many famous Japanese writers, alongside Dazai, Akutagawa, Arishima and Mishima, Kawabata was another victim of suicide. Mishima's death in 1970 seems to have impacted him greatly and, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, suffered from nightmares and regularly made jokes about his own death. Despite leaving no suicide note, he was found dead in April 1972 after gassing himself.