Word: kawabata
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that faith suffered its own Richter shock, and Japanese confidence in their ability to outsmart nature lay in ruins ... By night people huddled in high schools or town halls, in stairwells or around bonfires. By day they drifted back to the wreckage of their lives. Kazumichi Kawabata, 45 and grieving, searched brokenly through the remains of his house. He was looking for his driver's license, he noted dully. But "the most important thing, I can't get. That's the voice of my daughter...
...first year in Japan, the open, young American met, by chance, both Yasunari Kawabata, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great Zen scholar, D.T. Suzuki; and a little afterward he found himself on a set where Akira Kurosawa was directing Toshiro Mifune in Drunken Angel. Very soon, every foreigner who landed in Tokyo?Somerset Maugham, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, Philip Johnson?was calling on him to be shown around. Richie's shrewd, but forgiving, fascination with human quirks there gives us Truman Capote buying an "imitation geisha wig" and Kurosawa taking in a Fellini film without...
...Tokyo called "image clubs" where men pay to fondle and have intercourse with prostitutes feigning sleep. These contemporary forms of yobai are a bastardization of folklore myths about young men taking brides in their sleep. Yobai was even a theme of a novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata...
When I was living in Kyoto in the late '70s, Yasunari Kawabata was the most popular novelist among the American expatriates who were seeking a vision of a Japan untainted by foreign culture. Kawabata's aristocratic aesthetes, tea masters and geishas are the epitome of Flower Arranging Nation and some of his novels, to Western eyes, are more a series of beautiful tableaux than novels - too precious by half. His greatest works like Snow Country and House of Sleeping Beauties are haunting; more than any other Japanese author, Kawabata satisfies our appetite for strangeness and exoticism. Kawabata himself created...