On April 16, 1972, Yasunari Kawabata, Japan's first Nobel laureate in literature, suddenly died by inhaling gas and committing suicide without leaving a suicide note. Before his death, he once said: "Suicide without a suicide note is the best." A wordless death is an infinite life. ”
The mystery left by the sudden "wordless" death of this Japanese literary figure has become one of the ultimate mysteries in the literary world for a long time, and it has constantly stimulated more researchers to explore his life and inner world.
Snow Country, First Edition, 1938
The reader's impression of the author often comes from his work. Yasunari Kawabata's masterpieces "Snow Country", "Izu's Dancing Girl", "Ancient Capital", etc., these milestones in the history of Japanese literature are extremely beautiful and sentimental, containing the most delicate mood of Japanese aesthetics, and people can't help but guess that Perhaps Kawabata's suicide is a tragedy caused by artistic pursuits and real-world contradictions, and then smears Kawabata's life with legendary sadness.
Looking back on the life of Yasunari Kawabata, it is actually a life shaped by praise and imagination. Because of the unique aesthetic temperament of his works, he has always been defined as a "lonely scribe"; because it is difficult to understand some of his behaviors, he will be called a "strange genius". In particular, the word "lonely" suddenly portrayed him as a taciturn and cold-eyed artist, and "lonely literary scholar" seemed to become a character label for Yasunari Kawabata.
Yasunari Kawabata's first love Chiyo Ito
Admittedly, Yasunari Kawabata was an orphan who often traveled alone, buried his head in the library alone, and swallowed the bitterness of his first love's repentance alone. To a certain extent, these contributed to the formation of his arrogant personality, and he often took sadistic love and fatalistic death as the themes of his works. However, the resulting imagination that "Kawabata is equal to loneliness" is far from the truth. This is the product of Yasunari Kawabata being invisibly labeled, and it can even be said that this is our greatest "shaping" of this Showa literary giant.
Japan's "Shincho" magazine "Special Edition of the 50th Anniversary of Yasunari Kawabata's Death"
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Yasunari Kawabata's death, Japan has begun to hold many commemorative activities, in addition to his masterpiece "Snow Country" will be specially tv seriesed for the first time, the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature will hold the "Yasunari Kawabata Exhibition - People Who Love Others and Be Loved by Others", and the Yasunari Kawabata Literature Museum will unite with local attractions to launch a tour exhibition of "Touching Yasunari Kawabata's World View Tour". These commemorative activities will undoubtedly make more people know and understand this literary giant, but the keywords of "loving others, being loved by others" and "world view" also seem to remind us to re-examine and reflect on the inherent cognition and impression of Yasunari Kawabata.
In this regard, the book "Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man" by the Japanese scholar Atsushi Otino provides us with a new perspective for re-examining Yasunari Kawabata at this special point in time. In this biography, which took 15 years to write, the authors are committed to changing the long-standing research habit of praising and labeling Kawabata research. In the book's prologue, the author, Onino, bluntly states his views and the characteristics of the biography.
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After concluding the preliminary research of Kawabata's biography, I would like to tell you a surprising discovery - Kawabata is a very social writer... Of course, I didn't want to write a book critical of Kawabata, I just wanted to write a biography without any taboos.
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As the author puts it in his introductory video to Chinese readers, "This is a factual biography." In Onino's view, ordinary readers will like "biographies of great men" and family members will ask for praise-style biographies, but this preference and demand will not help people to know Yasunari Kawabata properly.
"Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man" by Atsushi Kotani
However, how can we get as close as possible to the facts and calmly and objectively restore the life of this literary circle? In this regard, the author Otino started from a large number of data research, based on diaries, letters and oral memories of friends, consulted nearly 400 kinds of literature including the "Complete Works of Yasunari Kawabata", and sorted out the annals of Yasunari Kawabata, thus refining the linear narrative of the biography to a specific time point in a certain month of a specific year, or even a specific point in time on a certain day. The detailed description of "delicate and complex" is the first intuitive feeling of the biography "Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man".
Recently discovered manuscripts by Yasunari Kawabata
The truth is in the details. It is precisely by virtue of a large number of literature and references to the results of previous research that the author Kotano truly reproduces the details of Yasushi Kawabata's adult life trajectory in the book, and at the same time, with Kawabata as the center, showing the complex and diverse ecology of the Japanese literary world during the Showa period. Compared with the early Biography of Yasunari Kawabata in Japan, the layers of these countless details in the book make the authenticity of the entire biography and the conclusions derived from it seem natural and credible. It can be said that deconstructing yasunari Kawabata's long-standing "lonely" image with the truth of seeking truth from facts is the mission of this biography.
So, why does "loneliness" become the most typical image label of Yasunari Kawabata? Perhaps the life of an orphan since childhood is naturally the basis of this image, and his long-term life in Kamakura in a semi-reclusive posture is very mysterious, coupled with the fact that people who have been in contact with him think that he hates socializing, which makes the rumors more and more real - Kawabata is lonely, socially phobia, and taciturn. So over time, Yasunari Kawabata's lonely image was slowly fixed and labeled.
Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima
In fact, from the above factors, we can see that when Yasunari Kawabata was alive, his image had begun to be constantly shaped. Among them, the most well-known shaper is Yukio Mishima. In this regard, a paragraph of inference by the author Otino in the book is very noteworthy:
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After careful investigation, I found that the only person who said that Kawabata was lonely and not good at socializing was Yukio Mishima. Many of Mishima's sayings are circulating in society, and some of them are misunderstood. Why did Mishima say that? I think it's out of jealousy... He must have seen that Kawabata was very good at socializing. Mishima may be a little anxious, he has always felt that only he understands this "teacher", he said that "teacher" is a lonely person. It's like a person confessing to a romantic partner: "You are indeed a lonely person, only I understand you." "This is purely a unrequited love of Mishima.
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As a well-known writer in post-war Japan, Yukio Mishima used his subjective cognition as an objective fact to shape the image of this "teacher". As a writer close to Kawabata, Mishima's remarks have always been considered to be the most valuable in revealing the "truth". As a result, it is not surprising that Kawabata's lonely image has been further solidified.
Yasunari Kawabata was surrounded by reporters after receiving the notice of the Nobel Prize in Literature
In this era of information flooding, only typical labels may not be forgotten, but this biography goes against the trend, detaging and rebelling against traditional typicals through details. In this sense, Atsushi Kotani's Yasunari Kawabata: The Two-Faced Man is a true biography that seeks to subvert tradition and is also rebelling against reality. "Declaring war" on a tradition that has long been taken for granted and strengthened undoubtedly requires great courage, but the principles of realistic writing and the detailed way of writing give the author, Onano, the courage to pay the highest respect to his "favorite" writer.