Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was a distinguished Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature for exemplifying in his writings the Japanese mind.Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka on June...
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Kawabata Yasunari was the first (and, until 1994, the only) Japanese author to achieve international status through receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, which came to him in 1968. His writings at...
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Fitzsimmons is an American poet, educator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese culture. In the following highly favorable assessment of 'House of the Sleeping Beauties, he perceives ...
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In the following favorable evaluation of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Ury notes that each of the pieces in the volume is "less a story in the usual sense than a node of storytelling, where sounds,...
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In the following review, Smock praises the concision and the highly evocative quality of the pieces in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
Somewhere in my future is a small, simple apartment, maybe a couple of ...
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In the following essay, Palmer examines Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories in an attempt to demonstrate that the form the author employed in these pieces was much more congenial to his talents...
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In the essay below, lebowitz maintains that the compression of detail in the stories in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is reflective of aspects of both primitivism and sophistication in Japanese culture.
If...
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Mishima is considered one of the most important modern Japanese writers. Both prolific and versatile, he wrote dozens of novels, dramas, short stories, essays and screenplays. His works often reflect ...
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In the essay below, Kimball closely scrutinizes the imagery in "House of the Sleeping Beauties, " detecting numerous pairs of opposing or contradictory images in the story.
In his Nobel ...
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In the following excerpt, Brock is harshly critical of the pieces in House of the Sleeping Beauties; he finds the title story, for example, "so dull that it requires positive effort to struggle...
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In the excerpt below, Masao examines Kawabata's early experimentation with European avant-garde aesthetics in several short stories. The critic finds "The Izu Dancer, " however, a...
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In the excerpt below, Petersen details the imagery and allusive language of "House of the Sleeping Beauties. "
Dancing figures—expressions of loneliness or focusing a sense of los...
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In the essay below, Takeda identifies Western literary influences on numerous Kawabata short stories.
Yasunari Kawabata, who died in 1972, was a towering figure in the Japanese literary world. But the...
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Keene is an American scholar and critic who has produced a number of translations and studies of Japanese literature. The following excerpt is taken from his discussion of Kawabata in the fiction volu...
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In the laudatory review below, Seibold admires the polish and precision of the pieces in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
Born in 1899, the same year as Hemingway and Borges, Yasunari Kawabata was venerated ...
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Critical Essay by Yoshio Iwamoto and Dick Wagenaar
[No] one can fail to notice the obsession with time modern man exhibits…. To think about the literary masters of this century is to think in l...
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Critical Essay by Hisaaki Yamanouchi
[The] early loss of [Kawabata's] parents seems responsible for the unique quality which one perceives in his life and work—a peculiar tension between...
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In the following excerpt, Miner discusses how Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata use different aspects of traditional Japanese literature, and how their work differs from the literature of the West.
Ther...
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In the following essay, DeVere Brown discusses how Kawabata focused on traditional culture in his major works.
Yasunari Kawabata is Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature. The prize, once mo...
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In the following essay, Araki traces Kawabata's changing style and notes "a steady progression in the refinement of his technical mastery and a development of the ability to enter deeply...
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In the following essay, Palmer emphasizes the importance of Kawabata's “palm-of-the-hand” short stories to his fictional oeuvre.
In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japane...
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Yasunari Kawabata
Yasunari Kawabata
