Word: kawabata
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Yukio Mishima had just about run out of challenge. He had produced 20 novels, 33 plays, a travel book, more than 80 short stories, and countless essays. He was a major contender for the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature that went to his countryman. Novelist Yasunari Kawabata. He sang on the stage, produced, directed and acted in movies. Often called "Japan's Hemingway" because of his love for physical contest and the outdoor life, he lifted weights and became proficient at karate and kendo, the ancient swordfighting game once practiced by the samurai warriors. He was a perfectionist...
...award the prize have a way of bypassing big and/or distinguished names in favor of astounding alternatives. But not since Icelander Halldór Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata...
...startled press made hurried inquiries, the world learned that the winner had turned out an impressive body of work, was in his 60s, revered by his countrymen and active in the P.E.N. Club. It was all very predictable as Nobel prizewinners go. But The Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata's first U.S. publication since the award, leaves the reader ambivalent: the prize-givers have not made fools of themselves, but there i is little reason for special jubilation at their choice...
...Kawabata's stylistic signature is the stringing together of minute episodes linked by association. Brilliant sunflower heads remind an old man that his own mind is fading. A girl's failure to notice new buds on a gingko tree is the first sign that she is deeply troubled. The plot moves as imperceptibly as the earth. It concerns a year in the lives of the Ogata family, particularly Shingo, the head of the household. At 62, he feels old and vaguely discontented. The light in his life comes from his new daughter-in-law Kikuko...
...first event of any consequence occurs-offstage-on page 167, and thereafter the book drifts to an uneasy solution. The pace is probably too slow for most Western readers. Yet for those who persevere, there is a reward. Though the story is seen through Shingo's eyes, Kawabata succeeds to an extraordinary degree in presenting the events as they must seem to other characters as well. The same conflicts are dramatized differently in several scenes. Voices echo and re-echo as tension and release are reflected in household rituals. In his fragile miniature of life, Kawabata has managed...