Confronting Modernity in Kawabata Yasunari’s Literature

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Robinson, Quade
- College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

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The works of Kawabata Yasunari and other Japanese Modernist authors are often viewed in terms of a binary between tradition and modernity. However, I propose Kawabata’s works actually critique this very viewpoint. Rather than a fear of losing out on traditional Japanese spirit, Kawabata is questioning the notion that tradition truly exists. In Kawabata’s pre-war works, characters view Japanese tradition as a refuge from the shock of modernity, but they soon come to realize it is only an illusion. After the war, Kawabata supports tradition only to better show the decline of society. In this thesis, I look at Kawabata’s pre-war works, Snow Country, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, and “The Dancing Girl of Izu” to understand how he viewed the complex interaction of tradition and modernity before the war. From there, I examine Japan’s defeat in the Fifteen-Year War as the most tragic event in Kawabata’s life, and what effects of the trauma we can see in his literature. I examine his post-war works, The Sound of the Mountain, Thousand Cranes, and The Master of Go, under the lens of Walter Benjamin’s notion of shock, that an individual must face trauma in their everyday life due to the forces of modernity. I present the Fifteen-Year War as the dividing point, after which Kawabata’s sensibility is irrevocably changed.

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