SOURCE: "Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972): Tradition versus Modernity," in World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 375-79.

In the following essay, DeVere Brown discusses how Kawabata focused on traditional culture in his major works.

Yasunari Kawabata is Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature. The prize, once monopolized by Western writers, was given to a Japanese for the first time in 1968. Japan had arrived as a modern nation in the economic and political sense, and it had staged the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 superbly. Perhaps the time had come to recognize a great Japanese writer, a hundred years after Japan's entry into the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The paradox is that Kawabata, who seems to have been recognized for Japan's modernity, focused on traditional culture and gave little attention to things modern and Western, even though he wrote in a Japan undergoing modernization and all his novels had a...