THE SOUND OF MOUNTAIN - KAWABATA YASUNARI

THE  SOUND OF MOUNTAIN  - KAWABATA  YASUNARI

The one and only Japanese writer to have won a Nobel Prize for Literature hitherto is none other than Kawabata Yasunari.  He won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works.  The above qualities of literature finesse are evident in his works such as Snow Country, Thousand Cranes and The Old Capital.

 

 

           

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1968 was awarded to Yasunari Kawabata "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind".  When Kawabata accepted the Nobel Prize, he said that in his work he tried to beautify death and to seek harmony among man, nature, and emptiness. 

 

The other Awards received by him being Japanese Order of Culture (1959) and the Goethe-medal (1959) in Frankfurt.

His works, which have enjoyed broad and lasting appeal, are still widely read internationally.

I was introduced to Kawabata’s writings during my teens by a mallu writer with the pseudonym “VILASINI” who has translated Kawabata’s “Sleeping Beauty” as “Sahashayanam” in my mother tongue.  In this novel the protagonist an elderly man visiting an establishment where young girls have been drugged to sleep nude and are unaware of his presence.  The impotent old man embraces the sleeping beauty and tries to explore his manliness sleeping by her side.

“Our language is primarily for expressing human goodness and beauty” – Quote by  Kawabata Yasunari

 “Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere” – Quote by Kawabata Yasunari

Kawabata Yasunari, (born June 11, 1899, Ōsaka, Japan—died April 16, 1972, Zushi) Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His melancholic lyricism echoes an ancient Japanese literary tradition in the modern idiom.

                               

                          

Kawabata’s House                                                                                        Kawabata’s Museum

 

The sense of loneliness and preoccupation with death that permeates much of Kawabata’s mature writing possibly derives from the loneliness of his childhood (he was orphaned early and lost all near relatives while still in his youth). He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and made his entrance into the literary world with the semiautobiographical Izu no odoriko (1926; The Izu Dancer). It appeared in the journal Bungei jidai (“The Artistic Age”), which he founded with the writer Yokomitsu Riichi; this journal became the organ of the Neo-sensualist group with which Kawabata was early associated.

This school is said to have derived much of its aesthetic from European literary currents such as Dadaism and Expressionism. Their influence on Kawabata’s novels may be seen in the abrupt transitions between separate brief, lyrical episodes; in imagery that is frequently startling in its mixture of incongruous impressions; and in his juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly. These same qualities, however, are present in Japanese prose of the 17th century and in the renga (linked verse) of the 15th century. It is to the latter that Kawabata’s fiction seemed to draw nearer in later years.

There is a seeming formlessness about much of Kawabata’s writing that is reminiscent of the fluid composition of renga. His best-known novel, Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country), the story of a forlorn country geisha, was begun in 1935. After several different endings were discarded, it was completed 12 years later, although the final version did not appear until 1948. Sembazuru (Thousand Cranes), a series of episodes centered on the tea ceremony, was begun in 1949 and never completed. These and Yama no oto (1949–54; The Sound of the Mountain) are considered to be his best novels. The later book focuses on the comfort an old man who cannot chide his own children gets from his daughter-in-law.

His famous works are –

    

         

                                                                                                              

      

      

           

                                                                                                               

  

                                                                                                            

                                                                                                               

His Selected Works -

      

Year             Japanese Title                    English Title                English Translation

1926	伊豆の踊子 Izu no Odoriko	The Dancing Girl of Izu	1955, 1998
1930	浅草紅團 Asakusa Kurenaidan	The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa	2005
1935–1937, 1947	雪国 Yukiguni	Snow Country	1956, 1996
1951–1954	名人 Meijin	The Master of Go	1972
1949–1952	千羽鶴 Senbazuru	Thousand Cranes	1958
1949–1954	山の音 Yama no Oto	The Sound of the Mountain	1970
1954	みづうみ（みずうみ） Mizuumi	The Lake	1974
1961	眠れる美女 Nemureru Bijo	The House of the Sleeping Beauties	1969
1962	古都 Koto	The Old Capital	1987, 2006
1964	美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to	Beauty and Sadness	1975
1964	片腕 Kataude	One Arm	1969
	掌の小説 Tenohira no Shōsetsu	Palm-of-the-Hand Stories	1988, 2006

                                                        Kawabata’s creative chamber

Yasunari Kawabata was born into a cultured family, his father being a doctor of medicine. When Kawabata was 3, his father died; the next year his mother died, and Kawabata went to live with his grandparents. When he was 8, his grandmother died, and in 1914 his grandfather died. The child was thus constantly confronted with the death of members of his family, and it is thought that this experience left its mark on the writer, who often dwells on the problem of death, or loneliness of life. In Diary of a Sixteen-year-old, actually written on the eve of his grandfather's death but published in 1925, Kawabata gives vent to his emotions in a haunting memoir of early sorrow.

After the death of his grandfather, Kawabata became a ward of his mother's family. During grammar school he was inspired to be a painter. Indeed, he enjoyed a lifelong interest in art. Later, however, while attending high school in Tokyo and living with relatives in Asakusa, he decided to become a novelist. His literary career dates from about this time, when he began writing stories and essays for little magazines and local newspapers.

Kawabata read contemporary Japanese authors of the Shirakaba Ha, or White Birches school, and translations of Danish and Swedish writers. From the beginning of his career Kawabata was at odds with the currently popular naturalistic school, pursuing instead a more subtle lyrically inspired tendency stemming from Japanese literary. During his student days he became acquainted with Kikuchi Kan, a writer of note and editor of the magazine Bungei Shunju. In 1923 Kawabata joined the magazine staff.

Graduating from the university in 1924, Kawabata together with other friends founded a literary magazine, Bungei Jidai. This journal was the starting point of a new school of writers, the Neoperceptionists, who reacted against both popular naturalism and the politically oriented Proletarian Writers' movement. Thereafter Kawabata wrote significant literary criticism and patronized young writers. In 1948 he became chairman of the Japanese PEN Club meetings, and in 1954 he was elected a member of the Japanese Academy of the Arts. Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. He committed suicide in Zushi on April 16, 1972.

Kawabata's fiction is distinguished by subtle psychological characterization and a lyrical style that is deceptively simple. His works might be called elegies of life. The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926) tells of a youth's sentimental love for a dancer in a troupe of entertainers who wander from one hot-spring resort to another. The "Kurenaidan" of Asakusa deals with the fascinating milieu of street gangs in the Asakusa quarter of Tokyo. The author introduces himself as a character in the story, depicting a variety of low-life types who inhabit the back streets of Tokyo, their customs and mores.

Snow Country (1947), a stylistic tour de force, analyzes the love and loneliness of a country geisha in a mountain hot-springs resort who has an affair with an urbane dilettante from Tokyo. Living in two different types of isolation, the two find their love ultimately impossible. It took 12 years for Kawabata to complete the “Snow Country”.  It established Kawabata as one of Japan's foremost authors and became an instant classic.

We shall do a literary analysis of “Snow Country” separately towards the end of this Blog post.

A Thousand Cranes (1949) depict the tangled lives and hopelessly complicated emotions of a group of people, with the subtleties of the tea ceremony for a background. The shattering of a famous tea bowl, a kind of symbolic breaking of an evil spell, is perhaps the strangest in a long series of chapters on the strange life of objects. The principal characters are left, each with his own tragedy of loneliness.

Sleeping Beauty (1961) reveals the faded memories of a man on the threshold of old age who indulges his erotic fantasies by visiting an establishment where young girls have been drugged to sleep naked and are unaware of his presence.

Orphaned at four, novelist and short story writer Yasunari Kawabata caught the eye of editors and writers in the 1920s with his spare, subtle, melancholic prose. After an experimental period from the mid- to late-1920s, Kawabata relocated to Kanagawa in 1934 and, in conjunction with his work as a reporter for Mainichi Shimbun, began to write his celebrated poetic novels. As one of the leading writers of postwar Japan, Kawabata continued to write as he founded new literary journals, promoted the translation of Japanese works into English, and mentored new writers, such as Yukio Mishima. In 1968, he became the first Japanese and East Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Considered to be among the most Japanese of Japanese writers, he served as a critic and as a mentor for other writers as well.

“The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.”

Yasunari Kawabata

The Izu Dancer is important to understanding Kawabata’s later works, for it introduces the motif of attraction to young, virginal women, which some critics have found central to Kawabata’s fiction.

The Dancing Girl of Izu, (Izu no Odoriko) published in 1927, was the first work of literature by Kawabata to achieve great popular and critical acclaim. The short story was first translated into English by Edward Seidensticker and published in an abridged form in The Atlantic Monthly in 1952. A complete English translation of the story was made by J. Martin Holman and appeared in a collection of Kawabata's early literature published as The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories. The story has been filmed several times in Japan, including one version starring Momoe Yamaguchi.

 

     



                                               




    
 Momoe Yamaguchi – 1                                                                                Momoe Yamaguchi - 2

Momoe Yamaguchi is a celebrated Japanese actress.

In the much later work, Nemureru bijo (1960-1961; “The House of the Sleeping Beauties,” in The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, 1969), this motif appears again in the much more perverse story of an impotent old man who frequents a house of assignation to sleep next to drugged, nude young girls.

“The snow on the distant mountains were soft and creamy as if veiled in a faint smoke” - Kawabata Yasunari

Snow Country

We shall now examine Kawabata’s much celebrated classic and Nobel Prize winner work “Snow Country”.

Snow Country (雪国 Yukiguni) was Kawabata’s first full-length novel. It became an instant classic and established Kawabata as one of Japan's foremost authors. The name "Yukiguni" ("Snow Country") comes from the location of the story. Shimamura arrives in a train coming through a long tunnel under the border mountains between Gunma (Kozuke no kuni) and Niigata (Echigo no kuni) Prefectures. Sitting at the foot of mountains, on the north side, this region receives a huge amount of snow in winter because of the northern winds coming across the Sea of Japan. The winds pick up moisture over the sea and deposit it as snow against the mountains, snow which reaches four to five meters in depth and sometimes isolates the towns and villages in the region. The lonely atmosphere suggested by the title infuses the book.

 

The novel began as a single short story published in a literary journal in January 1935, and the next section appeared in another journal in the same month. Kawabata continued writing about the characters afterwards, with parts of the novel ultimately appearing in five different journals before he published the first book in 1937, as an integration of the seven pieces with a newly written conclusion. After a break of three years, Kawabata started re-working the novel, adding new chapters, and published them in two journals in 1940 and 1941. He re-wrote the last two sections into a single piece and published in a journal in 1946, and another additional section in 1947. Finally, in 1948, the novel reached its final form as an integration of the nine sections.

Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in the remote hot spring (onsen) town of Yuzawa (although Kawabata himself didn't mention the name of the town in the novel).

The hot springs of the region were home to inns that were visited by men traveling alone and in groups, who paid for female companionship. The geisha of the hot springs did not enjoy that same social status as their more artistically-trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo and were usually little more than prostitutes, whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral. The choice of one of these women as the heroine adds to the atmosphere of the book.

The liaison between the geisha Komako and the male protagonist, a wealthy loner who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is doomed to failure, and the nature of that failure and the parts played in it by other characters form the theme of the book.

 

Edward G. Seidensticker, the noted scholar of Japanese literature whose English translation of the novel was published in 1957, described the work as "perhaps Kawabata's masterpiece." According to him, the novel reminds one of haiku, both for its many delicate contrapuntal touches and its use of brief scenes to tell a larger story. As Shimamura (the protagonist) begins to understand his place in the universe, the idea of "mono no aware" (the sorrow which results from the passage of things; see Motoori Norinaga) is also quite apparent.

Snow Country was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee in awarding Yasunari Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, along with The Old Capital and Thousand Cranes. Kawabata returned to Snow Country again near the end of his life. A few months before his death in 1972, he wrote an abbreviated version of the work, which he titled "Gleanings from Snow Country," that shortened the novel to a few sparse pages, a length that placed it among his “palm-of-the-hand” stories, a form to which Kawabata devoted peculiar attention for more than fifty years. An English translation of Gleanings from Snow Country was published in 1988 by J. Martin Holman in the collection Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

"In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it." (from The Snow Country, describing a scene in a train when the night turns the train window into a mirror)

Kawabata combined ancient Japanese literary tradition with modern language in his lyrical works. The formlessness which characterizes much of his writing reflects the fluid composition of renga, Japanese linked verse of the fifteenth century. During his life, Kawabata wrote more than one hundred “palm of the hand” stories, usually two or three pages long, which he said expressed the essence of his art.

He committed suicide after the death of his friend Mishima Yukio.

Image of Takuya Kimura who acted the role of young Kawabata

"In the spring, cherry blossoms, in the summer the cuckoo.
In autumn the moon, and in winter the snow, clear, cold."
"The winter moon comes from the clouds to keep me company.
The wind is piercing, the snow is cold."

“As he caught his footing, his head fell back and the Milky Way flowed down inside him witha roar.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country



The Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari  has a unique style which won him many admirers from the Western world as well.

Yasunari Kawabata was a distinguished Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature for exemplifying in his writings the Japanese mind.   His works combined the beauty of old Japan with modernist trends, and his prose blended realism with surrealistic visions.

As the president of Japanese P.E.N. for many years after the war (1948–1965), Kawabata was a driving force behind the translation of Japanese literature into English and other Western languages. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 1960, and awarded Japan's Order of Culture the following year.

Kawabata was posthumously awarded First Class Order of the Rising Sun.


Kawabata Yasunari was the Star of Asia due to his priceless literary contributions in Japanese and deserved to feature in JOHNNY’S BLOG.  

  

SAYONARA.........KAWABATA....!!