Word: kawabata
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...KAWABATA delighted in reflections. At the beginning of Snow Country, a man on a train is astonished by the sudden image of a woman's face in the window beside him; the "other worldly power" of this symbol recurs numerous times in this short novel, evoking a poignant sense of identity and separation, of love tempered by loneliness...
Beauty and Sadness, Kawabata's last novel, incorporates this theme into the very structure of the story, and uses it to explore the limits of human involvement. The book's characters, and their relationships, reflect each other in bewildering array; images distort, obscure, and sometimes clarify each other as if through the mirrors in a circus fun-house...
BEAUTY AND SADNESS by YASUNARI KAWABATA...
...Yasunari Kawabata's last novel is a consummately skillful arrangement of space and stillness, a brush drawing of love and vengeance not ultimately convincing, but perhaps ultimately not meant to convince. Yet the novel's measure is that its most fascinating feature may be the face of the writer bleakly regarding the reader from the dust jacket. Scraps of knowledge help: Kawabata, the author of Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968; he wrote no novel after this one; he killed himself at age 72 in 1972. The jacket photograph...
...Kawabata's face is that of a man who has indeed reached an ending, and speculation, though idle, is unavoidable. In what seems to be the only unguarded paragraph in the book, Kawabata's hero, a middle-aged writer, wryly asks his wife the proper retirement age for a novelist. The novel itself is an answer: it is time to stop writing when there is nothing left but professionalism...