SOURCE: "The Twilight Years, East and West: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain," in Explorations, edited by Makoto Ueda, University Press of America, 1986, pp. 87-99.

In the following essay, Tsuruta compares and contrasts the journeys undertaken by the aging main characters of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain.

If anyone were to think of comparing Hemingway with a Japanese writer, the first name to come to mind would most likely be that of Mishima Yukio. The two writers share a wide area of common ground: an intense concern with masculinity, an obsession with violence and death, a strong, colorful personality which often overshadowed their literary work, and finally the fact that both ended their lives in violent suicide. On the other hand, Kawabata Yasunari, who tried to assuage loneliness with the...