Word: kawabata
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...classic novel Snow Country, the Nobel prizewinning writer Yasunari Kawabata depicted the mountains of Japan's far north as the place where jaded urbanites could come to bathe in a forgotten innocence--symbolized by the cool Tokyo dilettante who takes up with a local geisha. At the book's haunting end, the man is returning to his wife in Tokyo, suitably refreshed, and the country girl, heartbroken, is left with only memories. Therein lies the promise, and the danger, of what promise to be splendid Games...
...their very different ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion clinics...
Kenzaburo Oe, a novelist who captured the alienation and moral malaise of Japan's "Westernized" postwar generation, became his country's second recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Japan's other winner was Yasunari Kawabata, in 1968.) Today's award triggered an outpouring of national pride -- newscasts led with the story and the Prime Minister issued congrats. The warm fuzzies all around contrast with the 59-year-old Oe's dark vision, steeped in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...