Word: kawabata
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...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...
...more inventive than the literary imagination Its plots (Jonestown, for example) are weirdly fertile, fatally ingenious. The idly speculative Connolly list, in any case, is Premature. It requires death and time to complete the writers myth. The Japanese have a macabre genius for the process. Their best writers-Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, for example-have established a tradition of committing suicide some time before nature forces its inevitable silence upon them...
...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...
...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...