Towards a New Aesthetic Vision: Ryūnosuke Akatugawa in the Polyphonic Reading of Yasunari Kawabata

The present study debates the way in which the Japanese author uniquely re-semanticises old Japanese aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware (‘the beauty of simple and transient things’) or yūgenbi (‘mysterious beauty’), by exploiting the valences of sight, in an interdisciplinary analysis where the poetic perspective and that of cultural semiotics is foremost. If touch, taste, smell and kinesthetic sense are senses centred on the body, which privilege direct, unmediated contact, it is acknowledged that hearing and seeing are senses that imply distance and perspective. Harnessing this characteristic of the optical, the Neo-Perceptionalist Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1970), in his novel House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1961), transforms sight into a narrative technique that tries to re-sacralise the real world. A millennium after the The Tale of Genji, the first Japanese novel, signed by Murasaki Shikibu, in which the ideal of pure beauty was given by the faceless woman, reduced to long hair and 12 layered kimonos (junihitoe), the nude and sleeping female body in House of the Sleeping Beauties becomes the transient moment of pure beauty in what the Japanese woodblock print calls “the floating world” (ukiyo) or the infinite variety of an ephemeral world. In a house of pleasures where elderly clients either dream pleasantly or remember their youth during the nights they spend next to (drugged) sleeping maidens, old Eguchi, who delights in contemplating the sleeping beauties’ bodies, finding himself somewhere between mystery and voluptuous fantasy, gains “the last gaze”. Before fading away, it captures the image (imago) and the icon (eikon) of impermanent things, changing them into purity and beauty.

Full Text