Word: kawabata
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MANY CRITICS have claimed, Kobo Abe is the best living Japanese novelist, it may only be because so many others (most notably Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata) have committed suicide. The irony, however, is that for the leading literary figure in Japan, Abe's writing has a remarkably Western flavor. Except for place names and a few distinctly oriental metaphors ("his thoughts shrank like a piece of fat meat plunged into boiling water"), Secret Rendezvous. Abe's sixth and most recent book could pass, like his others, for a Western novel...
...PREVIOUS works, Kawabata creates here an entire symbolic world through the use of colors. The painting that had brought Oki to visit Otoko was of a red flower...
...Kawabata casts the novel in his familiar impressionistic style. The action drifts smoothly, almost dreamily: the actual time span of the novel is only half a year, but past events are called and accumulated until the story finally assumes a completely timeless quality...
...frequent digressions, Kawabata seems to remark on his own structural style...
...Kawabata's lightness of touch, Beauty and Sadness may appear on casual reading to be rather slight. Yet it is perhaps the most elegantly constructed of Kawabata's novels. Like all of his works, it needs to be relished by the reader slowly, more like poetry than prose: associations must be given time to form, small details must be carefully absorbed. Kawabata was a master lyricist and a great writer about love; behind the misty outlines of his style one is bound to find a solid artistic core...