Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself
- Apr 2, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★☆☆
In 1968, Yasunari Kawabata became the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature from Japan. At the time, only two of his novels had been translated into English, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. It is perhaps fitting, then, that his acceptance speech, Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself, was his first work written for a Western audience. As far as speeches go, it is a most unusual one, and yet it is quintessentially Kawabata. In it, he discusses the “essence of the Japanese mind,” the quality in his works that was responsible for him winning the prize. Kawabata explores that essence—the spirit of Zen—as found in the works of twelfth-century poet-priests, in the ritual of the tea ceremony, in Japanese landscape gardening, in the spirit of Oriental painting.
Kawabata was a most contemporary writer but saw himself as a descendant of art and literature and a “spirit of the age” of nearly eight hundred years earlier. In his speech, he makes no reference to himself until the final paragraph: “Here we have the emptiness, the nothingness of the Orient. My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different.” It is, for those of us who count themselves as fans of Kawabata, utterly fitting and entirely revealing, and is, perhaps, the best litmus test for anyone contemplating an exploration of his writings.
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