Yasunari Kawabata, Japan's first Nobel laureate in literature, has an immortal masterpiece, Snow Country, which, like "One Hundred Years of Solitude," has influenced generations of Chinese writers such as Yu Hua, Mo Yan, and Jia Pingwa. Mo Yan once said: A sentence in "Snow Country", like a beacon in the dark night, illuminated my way forward.
However, there may be many readers who do not know this famous figure.
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and graduated from the University of Tokyo, a prestigious institution in Japan. When he was young, he suffered the death of both parents, followed by the death of his sister and grandparents, and he was known as "the celebrity who attended the funeral".
Throughout his life, he traveled to many places and had a depressed and melancholy mood, and this inner pain and sorrow became the literary background of Yasunari Kawabata. He wrote more than 100 novels in his lifetime, and his works were lyrical and pursued the beauty of sublimation in life. Deeply influenced by Buddhist thought and nihilism, Yasunari Kawabata is adept at using stream-of-consciousness writing to show the inner world of the characters.
《Snow Country》
"Snow Country" begins with a scene in which "after the tunnel, it's the snow country", a middle-aged man sitting on the seat of the train, his face against the window, looking out the window, the window formed a very strange superimposed shadow. Outside, the dark fields of the night receded, occasionally flashing around the campfires in the countryside, but the fluorescent lights in the carriages reflected the man's face on the windows.
The book reads: "A tired, obscene, time-soaked face of a middle-aged man", and at the same time, the night scene flowing outside the window and the campfire form a fantastic light and dark flashing scene, flowing like a river of time.
Just as this tired man was flowing in his old age, the face of a beautiful girl sitting next to him was superimposed in the back. This face pulls his mind back to more than a decade ago, the face that another maiden colt also had, and his memories unfold the story...
▲ Movie "Snow Country (1965)"
Yasusei Kawabata uses the moving windows of such a train to write a complex story that superimposes the fates of all the characters on a fluid visual opening. "Snow Country" is his highest masterpiece, in which the beauty of nothingness, cleanliness and sadness depicted reaches the extreme, which is heartwarming and sad.
If Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is just a "gensokyo," the novel "Ancient Capital" shows the reader all the features of Kyoto, Japan's thousand-year-old city. This book is almost a living Kyoto travel guide, and to this day there are many fans of Yasunari Kawabata, holding the book one by one to find the route taken by the protagonist in the book, perhaps the book has become a literary postcard of the city.
"Ancient Capital"
In the ancient capital of Kyoto, Chieko, who was adopted by a brocade merchant, became a beautiful maiden. On the night of Gion Festival, she meets the mountain village girl Miaozi and is surprised to learn that the two are twin sisters. They miss each other, but they can't recognize each other because of the disparity in identity. The sisters' faint sorrow is woven into the beauty of Kyoto's four seasons...
In Yasunari Kawabata's "Ancient Capital", there are ancient heian shrines, sacred trees deep in the forest, streams with falling maple leaves and bamboo forests in Saga, and gentle and elegant Japanese garden... He uses delicate and beautiful words to make us lament and mourn the characters in the book. At the same time, it also allows us to appreciate the beauty of Kyoto's ancient temple shrines and the pictures of flowers and trees, which makes people breathe.
The story begins in silence and ends in silence. In this novel, there is no rebuttal of the ugliness of human nature, and the net that is revealed is the wonderful truth of the world. That sincere and moving, meticulous affection, even if the years change, can always make people think of the fresh and elegant ancient capital, feel the most simple and innocent human brilliance.
Pure, clean, elegant, nothingness, dreamy, art, seasonal beauty, color beauty, this warm jade text, although it makes people fascinated, but also gives people a faint sense of sadness. Yasunari Kawabata vividly shows Japan's "beauty of mourning". The meaning of material sorrow is broader than sadness. In the form of beauty, "mourning" is no longer synonymous with sadness, and the sympathy contained in this emotion means the resonance of sorrow for others, and even the resonance of sadness for the world.
▲Movie "Ancient Capital "1980)"
Because Yasunari Kawabata is a reticent and introverted person, he has a feeling that language is different from ordinary people. We can grasp the clear rhythm of the content of the speech, for example, we will say more and more detailed things that are strongly emotional, and we will pass on the irrelevant things.
But in Yasunari Kawabata, we think there should be something, the part that should be written in a big book, and he has taken it all. But for the things we least care about, let's say: Chieko walks on the road and sees a flowering tree, then stops and looks at it for half a day, when someone walks by and brings a unique smell. He focuses on these details.
Yasunari Kawabata seems to ignore the storyline and renders the scene and scene details, but in fact uses these "idle pens" to cover up the mood of the characters, so that the text can achieve a silent victory over sound.
Yasunari Kawabata's Nobel Prize trilogy tells two stories, and one is his "Thousand Cranes" written in 1952. Yasunari Kawabata's writing is somewhat similar to Chinese ink painting, always understated, during which "A Thousand Cranes" is the heaviest ink color. The importance of "A Thousand Cranes" stems not only from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, but also from the fact that it reflects the unique style of Yasunari Kawabata's creation in many ways.
A Thousand Cranes
The story tells a story of a deformed love affair involving two generations. Kikuji Mitani's father was a famous tea ceremony chef who had an affair with a woman named Kinko Kurimoto, and later fell in love with Lady Ota. Four years after his death, Lady Ota, who had been in love with her father, fell in love with her father's son. Even if Ota cut himself, he could not erase the painful memories brought about by the deformed love. It brought endless pain to Kikuji and Fumiko, and also severed their fate.
The novel profoundly shows the entanglement and contradiction of human beings before the conflict between love and morality. The author's description of Japanese customs and tea ceremony is very delicate, and there seem to be a thousand white cranes flying in the sunset between the lines.
"The Dancing Girl of Izu"
"The Dancing Girl of Izu" is the famous work of Yasunari Kawabata, an outstanding short story that has been adapted to the screen 6 times.
On the sunny Izuyama Road, teenagers from Tokyo come across a group of touring entertainers who are attracted by kaoru, a naïve and delicate dancer. Kaoruko's singing voice is gentle and moving, the dance steps are light and beautiful, the teenager is shocked by her innocent beauty, and Kaoruko gradually develops a crush on the teenager. The parting moment is near, but it leaves behind the most beautiful first love in the world.
Like all first loves in the world, the young Kawabata in the story also faces a quiet, newborn, gentle, and beautiful impulse, like a green fruit in early spring, or a breeze in early summer, a palpitation that is not ripe. The novel shows the hazy and innocent emotions of the first love between young boys and girls, gives the reader a sense of freshness, and brings people into an ethereal and beautiful aesthetic world.
▲ Movie "The Dancing Girl of Izu (1974)"
The Nobel Prize for Literature once described it this way: Yasunari Kawabata greatly admired the delicate beauty and liked to use the kind of language that was often sad and symbolic at the end of the pen to express life in nature and human destiny.
We may not be able to understand Yasunari Kawabata's pursuit of the beauty of nothingness, but only learn from the text about the obsession with beauty and ugliness, the distance between the release of sin and beauty, the change and meaning of emotions, etc. Every reader will have his own ideas. Yasunari Kawabata's characters' inner emotions are entangled, contradictory, and even deviated from morality to make people think at the deepest bottom of human nature, which happens to be the meaning of literature - reflecting on themselves rather than converging.
*The pictures in this article are all from the Internet
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