Word: kawabata
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...KAWABATA delighted in reflections. At the beginning of Snow Country, a man on a train is astonished by the sudden image of a woman's face in the window beside him; the "other worldly power" of this symbol recurs numerous times in this short novel, evoking a poignant sense of identity and separation, of love tempered by loneliness...
Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata's last novel, incorporates this theme into the very structure of the story, and uses it to explore the limits of human involvement. The book's characters, and their relationships, reflect each other in bewildering array; images distort, obscure, and sometimes clarify each other as if through the mirrors in a circus fun-house...
...Kawabata's story takes place in that ethereal realm that lies between abstraction and reality Both Otoko and Keiko are painters living through and for their art Otoko plans a painting called Ascension of an Infant as a redemptive memorial to her head baby...
...Kawabata's attention to small details reinforces this sense of multiple images. Characters mouth the same words, think the same thoughts, and even visit the same locations as if they were indeed living each others lives...
...Kawabata's face is that of a man who has indeed reached an ending, and speculation, though idle, is unavoidable. In what seems to be the only unguarded paragraph in the book, Kawabata's hero, a middle-aged writer, wryly asks his wife the proper retirement age for a novelist. The novel itself is an answer: it is time to stop writing when there is nothing left but professionalism...