Abstract

It is widely assumed that, with a few notable exceptions, Japanese literature, and especially the work of novelist Yasunari Kawabata, focuses on beauty, emotion, and psychology, and that this focus is at the expense of moral or ethical exploration.Kawabata was Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, so to misunderstand his work so fundamentally is not just a matter for aficionados of arcana. The mistake deprives the international reading public of an important philosophical resource for understanding the modern world, the various phenomena of complicated grief, the effects of the atomic bombings and mass trauma more generally—and, yes, the postwar Japanese.1The Sound of the Mountain,2 serialized in..