Word: kawabata
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...SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN by Yasunari Kawabata. 276 pages. Knopf...
...award the prize have a way of bypassing big and/or distinguished names in favor of astounding alternatives. But not since Icelander Halldór Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata...
...startled press made hurried inquiries, the world learned that the winner had turned out an impressive body of work, was in his 60s, revered by his countrymen and active in the P.E.N. Club. It was all very predictable as Nobel prizewinners go. But The Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata's first U.S. publication since the award, leaves the reader ambivalent: the prize-givers have not made fools of themselves, but there i is little reason for special jubilation at their choice...
...Kawabata's stylistic signature is the stringing together of minute episodes linked by association. Brilliant sunflower heads remind an old man that his own mind is fading. A girl's failure to notice new buds on a gingko tree is the first sign that she is deeply troubled. The plot moves as imperceptibly as the earth. It concerns a year in the lives of the Ogata family, particularly Shingo, the head of the household. At 62, he feels old and vaguely discontented. The light in his life comes from his new daughter-in-law Kikuko...
...Translator Sir: Yasunari Kawabata's award of the Nobel Prize for literature [Oct. 25] could not be more deserving. His Snow Country is a book to read, reread and to treasure. But it can be read only in English by most of us, and I strongly suspect that the beautiful translation by Edward G. Seidensticker, which makes this possible, may have played a large part in attracting the attention of the panel. Your excellent article is lacking only in that it does not quote from his introduction to Snow Country: "In Snow Country we come upon the roaring silence...