Japanese Literature by Alan Tansman

Author:Alan Tansman [Tansman, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190933913
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Nearly half a century later, in 1968, when he represented himself to the world in his Nobel acceptance speech, Kawabata Yasunari displayed yet another style of ironic self-presentation. A dedicated surrealist writer who only appears to naively embrace an unsullied cultural past, Kawabata drew his inspiration from the Buddhist sphere of Japanese literary aesthetics, the sad, austere, autumnal qualities evoked by the Buddhist medieval poets Myôe and Ikkyû. Their mysterious, suggestive, and inferential poetry belonged squarely within the classical tradition, while its sensuality was akin, in his mind, to European Symbolism. In embracing this aesthetic, Kawabata was also alluding to a tradition shot through with the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhist distrust in the reliability of language, a tradition in which life-as-dream had become an aesthetic given. At the heart of this literary sensibility were what he calls “eyes at the final moment,” which glimpse enlightenment just as they are about to close forever. What can be more ironic than the fact that “eyes before death” came to Kawabata from Akutagawa, who, in his suicide note—a literary piece as famous as many a great novel—wrote that, “nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes before death.”

Kawabata was a surrealist, speaking, as he neared the end of his life (he committed suicide four years after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech), through the language of Buddhism. His gift to world literature was a set of sensual, erotic, strange, dreamlike-but-gritty short stories and novels—at once magical and realistic. Kawabata was a great experimenter with form, a master of the epiphanic prose-poem short story, the fractured narrative of modernity, and the seamless amalgam of European and Japanese literary expression. Kawabata’s masterwork Snow Country, a short novel he began in 1934 and completed in 1948, tells the story of a bored Tokyo intellectual, Shimamura, seeking honesty and authenticity in the countryside, in the land of snow.

Shimamura feels alienated from the landscape; he has lost the power—the kotodama—of language, and the capacity to create authentic art. The world of the novel is a canvas painted with the blended palette of sensual experience and literary imagination. The narrative develops according to the pacing of a Nô play, in what is known as the jo-ha-kyû rhythm, which is the gradual build-up, the increase in speed and tension—rapid, ecstatic climax—just as its characters also derive from the stock characters of Nô. The protagonist has been lured to the snow country by the memory of a young geisha, Komako, who serves as a blank canvas on which to paint not only the colors but also the sounds, smells, and vibrations of the natural world. Kawabata conjures her through touch and smell: “The dusky green of the cedars seemed to reflect from her neck,” and her skin like “white porcelain.” The snow country itself, like Komako, is a transparency, a canvas, a template for the senses.

4. A snow-bound hot spring resort, enclosed by snow-dusted trees, tucked snuggly into a frosted hillside, hard against a cold river sluicing through a narrow

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