SOURCE: "The Margins of life," in Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel University of California Press, 1974, pp. 95-121.

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 tradition-based piece that provides an "alternative to the eccentric internationalism of [Kawabata's 'modernist⁹ stories."]

Early in his career Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) was a member of the Neo-Perceptionist school (Shin Kankaku Ha). The existence of this group, as a part of Japanese literary history, is not so interesting or important in itself: its creed, like those of the Naturalists, the Anti-Naturalists, and other groups, derives from imported avant-garde European manifestoes, and, like most, suffers from poor digestion of same. Thrown into their modernist mélanges are bits and dollops of Paul Morand, Andreyev, Croce, Bergson, futurism, cubism, expressionism, dadaism, symbolism, structuralism, realism, Strindberg, Swinburne, Hauptmann...