SOURCE: "Biblical Influence upon Yasunari Kawabata," in Neohelicon, Vol. X, No. 1, 1983, pp. 95-103.

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 number of his readers in the West was always rather limited and his literary fame there alternated between eminence and eclipse until after he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968.

His literary works are often considered to be genuinely traditional, but if we read them carefully, we come to the realization that they contain modern elements. It is a fact that Yasunari Kawabata used the traditional Japanese technique of association in his novels. But it would be a mistake to view his literature as nothing more than a continuation of the Japanese tradition. Throughout his life Kawabata had a deep interest in Western literature...