Yasunari Kawabata and the Nostalgia of the Timeless Time

Seeking to express the inexpressible, combining linguistic simplicity with literary ambiguity, Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) explored an area of modern Japanese prose in an original and apparently unequalled manner. His novels are constituted from a flow of images; temporal continuity and causal objectivity are replaced by an inner unity which goes beyond space and time. Suggesting that between people and things there is a coordination and synchronization of feelings, a mutual influence named by Japanese aesthetics mono no aware, the novel Snow Country, using the haiku technique, which concentrates the image in the details, fragments, succeeds in suspending the antinomy between real and eternal. The text suggests that, after all, the duality of this world, the hiatus between the world of reality and of intuition, between nature and mind, between civilization and basic human instincts, between present and the timeless time is passed beyond. Man is continuously searching for the eternity from which he was detached through the existence he received, seeking for the primordial entity from which the human being was tragically separated by the pleasures of the world which have been given to him together with the pain of being. The present study tries to examine a possible answer offered by Kawabata’s novel to the eternal dilemma of Japanese spirituality of choosing between sensuality (or living) and the attraction of nothingness, as it is proposed by Zen Buddhism.

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