We all love world literature, don’t we? We love to read translated literature that crosses oceans, cultures, norms, and expectations. But it hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when we stuck our heads in the sand and ignored all but a few foreign writers: Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens…etc. Even the so-called European High-Modernism of the 20th century was popularized by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, three Americans who wrote in English. Now we know how myopic we were. The world is full of incredible writers not writing in English. I’m glad we live in a shrinking world where we have that wonderful invention which Jorge Luis Borges predicted and Al Gore created: the internet. Now it’s easy to find a list of African writers. Two clicks and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi Wa’ Thiong O’, Ben Okri, and Naruddin Farah show up in front of me. And while it’s wonderful to celebrate the ease of our options, it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always like this. Japan, until midway through the 20th century was an isolated literary treasure chest. Then in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature and America began noticing.
Truth be told, for Kawabata, 1968 wasn’t the beginning of a new era, it was the culmination of a lifetime spent promoting Japanese fiction. Around 1927 Kawabata began championing the youngest, most talented, and most experimental writers from Japan. Similar to the role Pound played for the Modernists, or Allen Ginsberg played for the Beats, Kawabata handpicked writers he felt would, could, and should define what it means to be an artist. Most notable among Kawabata’s flock was Yukio Mishima. After WWII Kawabata continued his goal of creating a focused literary national identity by opening the Kamakura Bunko Publishing House. Kamakura Bunko made interesting books, and they made em’ cheap. Now, for the first time in Japan, cheap books were available to the general public. Junichiro Tanizaki, Osamu Dazai, and Kenzburo Oe became available to anyone, and Post-War Japanese literature exploded. Now that his countrymen were writing interesting books, and those books were widely available to a hungry public, Kawabata decided to push the boundaries by erasing borders. After becoming the President of the Japanese chapter of the P.E.N. foundation, Kawabata spent most of his energy getting people to translate Japanese novels. He was successful. Add all this to his winning the Nobel in 68’, and you’ve got a Japanese literary Davy Crockett, spreading the seeds of his country’s best minds across the globe.
A journalist’s account of a six month game of Go between an aging Master and a young challenger, Kawabata’s most complete novel The Master of Go is a subtle meditation on the movement from aesthetic traditions towards modern rationalism that remembers the important things that are left behind when the world starts spinning faster. It may sound like another self-important writer telling you about how society is crumbling, and I know you don’t need more of that type of thing. Orwell, Sinclair, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck have done a wonderful job showing us how heavy handed didacticism can be valuable, and those declarative novelists are important, but Kawabata’s pedagogy is simpler, less heavy, more informative, and more convincing. Although you never get away from Kawabata’s teachings, you never feel like he’s the old man who tells you to get off his lawn.
When you think about the influential writers of the 20th century, whether it’s Faulkner introducing people to the American South, Joyce showing us his Dublin and his underpants, Virginia Woolf reminding many that women too can write mind-blowing books, or Baldwin showing us his Harlem and Joyce’s underpants, make sure to add Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winning novelist, to the short list of people who changed how we read, even if we’ve never read him.
–Brian Contine
BookPeople 