SOURCE: "Oriental Angst," in The San Francisco Review of Books, Vol. XII, No. 4, Spring, 1988, p. 19.

In the following review, Lowitz discusses the opposing forces of tradition and modernity in Kawabata's The Old Capital.

Though Yasunari Kawabata, the only Japanese novelist to receive the Nobel Prize, is best known for the novels Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, readers will find The Old Capital a welcome addition to the English-language works of Japan's great elegiac writer. Written in 1961, The Old Capital was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee, but has only now been translated into English by a doctoral student, J. Martin Holman, at Berkeley. The respectable translation embues the story with a stillness that allows the beauty of the language to surface while the mysteries of the character's lives open and close like a succession of folding screens.

The Old Capital takes place in Kyoto...