Kawabata Quotes

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

And I can't complain. After all, only woemn are able really to love ~ Yasunari Kawabata

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

My head hasn't been very clear these last few days. I suppose that's why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be as clean as they are. I was thinking on the train - if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off - well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. 'Do this up for me, please,' you'd say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

He closed his eyes and the warmth sank into his head, bringing an immediate sense of life. Reality came through the violent breathing, and with a sort of nostalgic remorse. He felt as though he was waiting tranquilly for some undefined revenge. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night clolour. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Seeing the moon, he becomes the moon, the moon seen by him becomes him. He sinks into nature, becomes one with nature. The light of the "clear heart" of the priest, seated in the meditation hall in the darkness before the dawn, becomes for the dawn moon its own light. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?'
'You sometimes even feel sentimental for it. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The baby understands that its mother loves it. [ ... ] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan's two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It's ~ Nancy Pearl

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight's play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl's breast. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The bonds between men and women predate language, and while the words we have used to express those ties may have grown exceptionally subtle and refined since language first arose, they are still just words. Words make our loves richer and more complicated, yes, but much has also been lost on their account - shrouded in the trappings of the age, drunk on the vacuity of artificial thrills. The progress of language is both a friend to love between the sexes and its enemy. Such love abides, it seems, in the mysterious depths where language cannot reach. Perhaps it's a slight exaggeration to say that the language of love is a stimulant, a drug; but whatever led us humans to create such a language , it was not life itself - which is the root of love - and therefore that language cannot engender the life that is the root of all else. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

A secret, if it's kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

I could not bear the silences when the drum stopped. I sank down into the depths of the sound of the rain. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

[ ... ] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Long accustomed to a life of self-indulgent solitude, he began to yearn for the beauty of giving himself to others. The nobility of the word 'sacrifice' became clear to him. He took satisfaction in the feeling of his own littleness as a single seed whose purpose was to carry forward from the past into the future the life of the species called humanity. He even sympathized with the thought that the human species, together with the various kinds of minerals and plants, was no more than a small pillar that helped support a single vast organism adrift in the cosmos
and with the thought that it was no more precious than the other animals and plants. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state."
-from "A Prayer in the Mother Tongue ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Thinking to be tactful and adroit, the woman stood ~ Yasunari Kawabata

After all, only women are able really to love. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

What I believe to be memories are probably daydreams. Still, my own sentimentality yearns for them as if they were the truth, suspect or twisted though they may be. I have forgotten that they were stories I heard from another and feel an intimacy with them as if they were my own direct memories"
-from "Oil ~ Yasunari Kawabata

A voice so beautiful it was almost lonely, calling out as if to someone who could not hear, on ship far away. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The course of one's life is a difficult thing."

-from "Diary of My Sixteenth Year ~ Yasunari Kawabata

When you die, there is nothing
only a life that will be forgotten."
-from "Gathering Ashes ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.
The day you die. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Now that Otoko had heard about the night at Enoshima, that old love flared up ominously within her. Yet in those flames she could see a single white lotus blossom. Their love was a dreamlike flower that not even Keiko could stain. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako's life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only parading his masculine shamelessness, and yet it seemed likely enough that the woman was familiar with the failing and need not be shocked by it. He looked at her. Perhaps it was the rich lashes of the downcast eyes that made her face seem warm and sensuous. She shook her head very slightly, and again a faint blush spread over her face. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words ... ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Two middle-aged American couples came back from the dining car and, as soon as they could see Mt. Fuji, past Numazu, stood at the windows eagerly taking photographs. By the time Fuji was completely visible, down to the fields at its base, they seemed tired of photographing and had turned their backs to it. The ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Anyway, it's hardly a problem worth worrying about. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

You think I'm drunk and talking nonsense? I'm not. I would know she was being well taken care of, and I could go pleasantly to seed here in the mountains. It would be a fine, quiet feeling. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata wrote: "When speaking of those who take their own lives, it is always most dignified to use silence or at least restrained language, for the ones left most vulnerable and most deeply hurt by such an occurrence can feel oppressed by the louder assertions of understanding, wisdom and depth of remorse foisted upon them by others. One must ask: Who is best served by speculation? Who is really able to comprehend? Perhaps we must, as human beings, continue to try and comprehend, but we will fall short. And the falling short will deepen our sense of emptiness. ~ Howard Norman

Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

You've always been fond of understanding people too well."
"They should arrange not to be understood quite so easily. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

But even more than her diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully cataloged every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.
"You write down your criticisms, do you?"
"I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all."
"But what good does it do?"
"None at all."
"A waste of effort."
"A complete waste of effort," she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.
A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Twenty years old, I had embarked on this trip to Izu heavy with resentment that my personality had been permanently warped by my orphan's complex and that I would never be able to overcome a stifling melancholy. So I was inexpressibly grateful to find that I looked like a nice person as the world defines the word."

-from "The Dancing Girl of Izu ~ Yasunari Kawabata

This is no world for gentle people ~ Yasunari Kawabata

It's remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they'll come for us ~ Yasunari Kawabata

No, it didn't hurt. He didn't want to lose any black hair, and he was careful to pull out the white hairs one by one. But when he had finished, the skin was drawn and shriveled. It hurt when you ran your hand over it, the doctor said. It didn't bleed, but it was raw and red. Finally he was put in a mental hospital ... He didn't want to be old, he wanted to be young again. No one seems to know whether he started pulling it out because he had lost his mind, or he lost his mind because he pulled out too much. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Even if you took it as cascading snowy mountains,it was not a cool snow-white. The cold of the snow and it's warm colour made a kind of music. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

And the Milky Way, like a great aurora, flowed through his body to stand at the edges of the earth. There was a quiet, chilly loneliness in it, and a sort of voluptuous astonishment. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser. ~ Yasunari Kawabata