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 attracted a worldwide audience who saw in them expressions of the traditional beauty and aesthetic values of Japan as well as some of the exoticism that it hoped to find in books about the country. Yet Kawabata's work is much more complex and multidimensional than such a reading suggests. His works, particularly those of the postwar years, certainly celebrate the rich cultural heritage of Japan, but a careful reading reveals that his preoccupation with the past resulted less from a desire to preserve tradition than from a desire to indulge in the pleasures of the past precisely because they were unattainable. One motif common to most of Kawabata's works is that of distancing: characters rush away from becoming involved...