In this blog post, I analyze how the discourse on the “Japanese sense of beauty” is constructed as a hybrid of solitude, eroticism, and Orientalism through the works of Yasunari Kawabata.
Yasunari Kawabata and the Japanese Sense of Beauty
Yasunari Kawabata is often cited as one of the first authors that comes to mind when discussing Japanese literature. The delicate lyricism and subtle depictions of nature he presented are often immediately defined as a “Japanese” sensibility. However, this tendency to view Kawabata simply as a “writer who depicts traditional beauty” may be an illusion stemming from the fantasies of foreign readers or the image disseminated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech—in other words, a variation of Orientalism.
While nature in Kawabata’s works certainly embodies Japanese lyricism, it is not merely a depiction of scenery. Combined with a detached eroticism, nature absorbs the inner loneliness and isolation of human beings, functioning as a device that reflects psychological emptiness. Characters deprived of social relationships project their loneliness onto sexual motifs or images of nature; as a result, the nature that emerges is a landscape tinged not with beauty but with a sense of loss.
Kawabata himself, judging by his outward biography alone, leads a tragic life. Born in Osaka in 1899, he lost his parents, older sister, and then his grandfather in quick succession during his childhood, effectively growing up as an orphan. This lonely boyhood connects to the detachment and restraint toward the mundane that permeate his entire body of work, as well as his relentless exploration of the human psyche. Rather than warm human relationships in everyday life taking center stage in his works, death and loneliness repeatedly appear as aesthetic devices, lending a sense of tension to the text.
Around the time of his literary debut, the New Sensationists, led by figures such as Riichi Yokomitsu, emerged to criticize outdated forms and clichéd content. As a core member of the New Sensationists, Kawabata experimented with expressions that stimulated the senses and emotions, which led to a writing style in his works where inner feelings are evoked through sensory devices rather than being directly revealed.
Building on his foundation as a member of the New Sensation School, Kawabata published numerous works, including ‘The Izu Dancer’, ‘Snow Country’, ‘Thousand Cranes’, ‘The Sound of the Mountain’, and ‘The Lake’, and in 1968, he became the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. While this established him as a national author, one must be cautious about interpreting him solely as a writer who “captured the traditional beauty of Japan.” This is because the concept of “traditional beauty” advocated by Japanese critics often reflects the fantasy that “Japan possesses a unique form of beauty.”
Just as Western readers interpret Kawabata through an Orientalist lens, foreign readers encountering his works through translation tend to perceive his novels through a “foreign” sensibility. Korean readers, too, should examine how the aesthetics within his works function within the context of individual loneliness and the era, rather than uncritically accepting the interpretations of Japanese critics.
Commentary on Major Works
The Dancer of Izu
“The Dancer of Izu” is a work that intertwines the atmosphere of Japanese hot spring culture with the inner world of the young protagonist, using a hot spring resort as its setting. Through descriptions of nature—such as mountain paths, rain, and forests—the novel draws the reader into a separate world disconnected from daily life, thereby emphasizing the encounters and emotional twists that unfold at the resort.
The “I” in the story is a twenty-year-old high school student who meets a traveling troupe of dancers and becomes their traveling companion. Although the troupe is socially despised as lowly beings, their simple and warm atmosphere helps “I” unravel his complex emotions. In particular, the depiction of the secret contact with the dancer reveals a psychology that goes beyond mere sexual arousal, showing how a lonely and alienated self seeks temporary relief through contact with another.
The opening descriptions of the mountain path and the pouring rain instantly detach the novel’s world from everyday life, highlighting a traveler’s nostalgia and an otherworldly lyricism. Consequently, contrary to its surface-level appearance as a simple coming-of-age story, this work can be read as a complex narrative where structures of social discrimination intersect with the solitude within the individual.
A Thousand Cranes
“A Thousand Cranes” is a work characterized by a surreal aesthetic sensibility mediated through the senses. The tranquility of Engakuji Temple, tea ceremony culture, and traditional elements such as tea cups are woven throughout the work, creating an atmosphere where past and present, reality and fantasy, intertwine.
Another distinctive feature is that the central events of the work are difficult to evaluate solely through an ethical lens. The protagonist, Kikuji, finds himself deeply captivated by a Shino tea bowl—a memento linked to Mrs. Ota’s suicide—amidst his complex relationships with women connected to his late father. The traces of lipstick on the bowl and its subtle hues of light brown and red function not merely as physical markers but as psychological devices intertwined with memory, sensation, death, and temptation.
Following Mrs. Ota’s passing, Kikuji experiences a sense that the tactile sensations, scents, and the past times condensed within the teacup resonate more powerfully with him than her physical form or face. The traces on the teacup serve as a symbol condensed at the intersection of cause and effect, becoming a central element that unifies the dreamlike atmosphere of the entire work.
The Lake
“The Lake” is one of Kawabata’s more avant-garde and abstract works. Instead of the lyricism of nature, a refracted psyche comes to the fore, and the narrative structure demands the reader’s intellectual engagement, much like solving a puzzle. In other words, the traditional imagery seen in works like “The Izu Dancer” or “A Thousand Cranes” is diminished, and fragments of unconscious memories scatter radially to form a single dreamlike scene.
Although the novel begins with an opening scene reminiscent of a detective story, it soon shifts into an unstable psychological drama. The protagonist, Momoi Kinpei, lives with a habit of tailing women and a past that floods into the present. In one scene, the memory of a mouse he caught as a child resurfaces, casting an unpleasant shadow over his current actions and emotions, while sensations from the past dreamlike-ly fade the colors of reality.
Rather than directly depicting the postwar social situation, ‘The Lake’ chooses to explore how an individual’s unconscious and sense of loss spread across time and space. Since the scattered fragments of memory only coalesce to reveal meaning once the entire work has been read, the reader must actively reconstruct the narrative fragments to complete the story.
In this way, “The Lake” breaks with the tendency within Kawabata’s literature to focus on traditional aesthetics, while adopting a textual strategy that tests the reader’s intellectual abilities through white space and literary devices. Consequently, reading the work leaves the reader with a sense of both pleasure and perplexity, and the text invites individual interpretations.
This collection includes the three works discussed above, showcasing various facets of Yasunari Kawabata’s literature. His early work, “The Izu Dancer,” is often simplified as a coming-of-age narrative, but in reality, it explores individual loneliness and structures of social discrimination wrapped in Japanese lyricism. “A Thousand Cranes” places cultural keywords such as the tea ceremony and the kimono at the forefront to construct an aesthetic consciousness where traditional beauty and dreamlike time intersect, while “The Lake” reveals Kawabata’s experimental orientation in his later years through fragments of the unconscious.
At a time when the “lyrical lightness” of contemporary Japanese fiction has become familiar to Korean readers, Yasunari Kawabata’s works invite us to reconsider how Japanese literature has portrayed the human psyche. This collection will evoke the unique sensibility of modern Japanese fiction through the master’s artistry, style of expression, and aesthetic sensibility.
