A Study On Kawabata Yasunari's Artistic Achievement And Social Significance

Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) is the second author in Asia and the first in Japan to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the past decades, his works have been translated and studied widely in China and cast great influence. Kawabata has achieved exceptional literary distinction. Because of his significance in helping us obtain a comprehensive understanding of Japanese culture, he has become one of the focuses of literary and artistic communication between Japan and China. So far, more often than not, the scholarship on Kawabata is about the author and his works. Scholars have not paid enough attention to the study of cultural factors underlying the artistic achievement and social significance of his works.The introduction of this dissertation undertakes a literature review on Kawabata both in Japan and in China. The body of the dissertation, through comparison and analysis, discusses the necessity and academic significance of a study of the cultural factors underlying the artistic achievement and social significance of Kawabata's works. This dissertation, through textual analysis and examination, examines the artistic achievement and social significance of Kawabata's works, and then moves onto the exploration of the main content, underlying foundation, and the social significance, of Kawabata's esthetic consciousness. The social significance is ignored by most Japanese and Chinese scholars. Because of the existence of a sizable body of studies devoted to Kawabata, this dissertation turns away from the diachronic method; instead, it intends to reveal the characteristics and causal relationship of the formation, development and evolution of Kawabata's artistic achievement and social significance by making a systematic study of"the influence of Neo-Sensualism,""characterization,""representation of nature,""the cultural factors beneath Kawabata's literary achievement"and"social significance"successively.Following a thorough study of Kawabata's artistic achievement and social significance, this dissertation proposes three original statements: first, when discussing the influence of the modernistic arts on the author's creative writing, it is neither fair to say the author always held steadfastly to Neo-Sensualism, nor is it fair to say it was his failure in the tentative efforts in Neo-Sensualism that led to his shift to pursuing traditional techniques. Kawabata never mechanically borrowed anything from Westerners'modernistic writing techniques, and instead, he made a perfect combination of the new techniques and the Japanese traditional esthetics. Thus, he crafted his own esthetic style. Second, personalities and life styles that seek to justify their own existence and satisfy themselves in an unbound perception characterize Kawabata's characters and their emotional reactions. The natural elements of the aesthetics such as"mononoaware"are closely related to"animatism"and"vegetal aesthetics,"and the underlying cultural factors of such aesthetics can be attributed to Buddhist teaching, caducity of life and deism. Thirdly, since most scholars have ignored the social factors of the literati's images, social changes after WWII and the depiction of the people of all walks in Kawabata's representative works, it is advisable for us to pay due attention to this aspect.