Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are doing
something a little different. We're sinking our
watches to a very specific, very turbulent year
in history. 1968. Ah, 1968. I mean, that year
just conjures up so many images. It really does.
We've got riots in Paris, protests across America,
the Vietnam War heating up. It really felt like
the whole world was on fire. Exactly. The West
was just loud. Right. It was chaotic and screaming
for change. But if you if you sort of pan the
camera over to Stockholm, Sweden in December
of that year, something much quieter, but I'd
argue equally revolutionary was happening. Right.
For the very first time in history, the Western
literary establishment talking about the Nobel
Committee, they finally looked east. They opened
the gates to Japan. It was a huge moment, a watershed
moment, really. They awarded the Nobel Prize
in literature to Yasunori Kawabata. Yeah. And
in doing so, they weren't just honoring one man.
No. They were, for the first time, acknowledging
an entire aesthetic universe that the West had,
for the most part, just completely ignored. And
that's the hook for me. That's what I couldn't
let go of. Because when you look at the pictures
of Kawabata, this frail, silver -haired man in
a tuxedo standing among all these towering Western
figures, he just looks like the epitome of traditional
Japan. He really does. You read his citation
and it's all about narrative mastery and great
sensibility. You read descriptions of his prose
and they use words like spare, lyrical, haiku
-like. It all sounds so... It does. It sounds
like a Zen garden in literary form. Right. But
then you start digging. You open the file on
his life and you realize that this piece is actually
a fortress. It's a wall he built to hold back
this absolute tidal wave of trauma. Yeah. The
more I read about his early life, the more I
realized that his obsession with beauty wasn't
really about flowers and tea ceremonies. It was
a survival mechanism. You've just hit on the
central paradox of Kawabata. He is so often misread,
especially here in the West, as this gentle purveyor.
of exotic Japan. But if you actually read the
texts and if you look at the biography we have
in front of us, you see that his work is defined
by a profound, almost terrifying isolation. He
was a man who stared right into the abyss and
then just decided to describe how beautiful the
darkness was. So that is our mission today. We
are not just doing a book report. We are going
to try to unpack the psychology of a survivor.
Yeah, let's do it. We're going to look at how
a man who lost literally everyone he loved before
he could even vote managed to bridge this huge
gap between ancient Japanese tradition and like
cutthroat European modernism. And we're going
to try to answer the question that I think everyone
has when they first read him. Oh, I know what
you're going to say. Why do his stories, which
famously never seem to have real endings. Why
do they stick with us so hard? It's a journey
into art for art's sake, but an art that was
born from a kind of loneliness that most of us,
thankfully, can't even begin to imagine. So let's
start right there with the loneliness. Because
lonely feels, I don't know, it feels like too
small a word for what happened to this kid. It's
an understatement. When I was going through the
timeline of his childhood in Osaka, I honestly
had to stop and check the source material because
I thought there must have been a typo. It's brutal.
It reads less like a biography and more like
a Victorian horror story. It is the orphan narrative.
And in Japanese literary criticism, this isn't
just, you know, a footnote in his life. Yeah.
It is considered the foundational trauma of his
entire existence. It explains everything. Okay,
so let's walk through this because the sheer
pacing of it matters. Kawabata is born in 1899
in Osaka. His father's a doctor from a highly
educated wealthy family. On paper, things look
good. Right, a privileged start. But then the
dominoes just start to fall. So fast. Unbelievably
fast. First, his father. He dies of tuberculosis
when Kawabata is just two years old. Okay, that's
a tragedy. But he still has his mother. For one
more year, his mother dies when he's three. So
at age three, an age where you barely have forming
memories, he is, for all intents and purposes,
an orphan. He's sent to live with his grandparents.
Now, he had an older sister, right? He does.
This is where the isolation starts to become
structural. It's not just about loss. It's about
separation. He isn't kept with his sister. They
split them up. They split them up. She is sent
to live with an aunt. Kawabata stays with the
grandparents. That separation alone is just brutal.
I mean, do they even see each other? Almost never.
The records we have show they met only one time
after that initial separation. One time? One
time. It was in July 1909. Kawabata was 10 years
old. Just try to imagine that reunion. This is
your only sibling, your only living link to your
parents. And then what happened? She died the
next year. He was 11. Oh, my God. It's relentless.
And we aren't even done. Not even close. Yeah.
So he's living with his grandparents. His grandmother
is the matriarch, the primary caregiver. And
she dies in September 1906. Kawabata is 7. So
from the age of 7 to the age of 15, his entire
world shrinks down to just one person. His grandfather.
And this isn't some spry, active grandfather
who takes him fishing. The sources are pretty
clear that he was blind and very ill, right?
Yes. And this is a really crucial detail for
his development as a writer. Imagine being a
young boy, seven, eight, nine years old, living
in this dark... quiet house with a blind, dying
old man. He became a caretaker. He became his
nurse. He was changing bedpans. He was feeding
him. He was describing the world outside the
window to him. He was essentially living in a
hospice as a child. And then the final blow,
the one that leaves him completely alone, comes
in May of 1914. His grandfather dies. Calabado
is 15. Let's just pause there. Let's look at
that scorecard. Right. By the age of 15, he has
lost his father. His mother, his grandmother,
his only sister, and his grandfather. He is the
last one standing. He has lost every single close
paternal relative he has in the world. That is
the definition of what you call the orphan psychology.
It's more than just grief, isn't it? It's a lesson.
It's the universe teaching him a lesson, yes.
And the lesson is that connection is cursed.
If you love someone, they die. That's what he
learned before he even hit puberty. There's a
detail in the biography that just chilled me.
He was known in his local area as the master
of funerals. Can you imagine that label on a
teenager? It's unthinkable. The master of funerals.
It sounds like a character from one of his own
novels. So practically speaking, where does he
go? He's 15 years old. He's on his own. Well,
he moves in briefly with his mother's family,
the Corotas. But, and this is so telling, he
doesn't stay. He can't seem to integrate into
a new family. It's like the habit of being alone
is already too strong. He doesn't know how to
be part of a family anymore. It seems that way.
By January 1916, at age 16, he moves into a boarding
house near his junior high school. That image
just haunts me. A 16 -year -old boy coming home
from school to an empty boarding house room.
No parents to ask about his day. No family dinner.
Just silence. And that silence is where the wall
comes from. That's where it's built. Decades
later, critics would talk about the distance
in his writing, how his characters always feel
like they're watching life from behind a sheet
of glass. Yeah. That wasn't some stylistic choice
he picked out of a catalog. That was his lived
reality. He learned to observe the world without
actually participating in it. Because for him,
participating meant losing. But he's still human.
He did try to participate again. And this brings
us to what the biographers call the first heartbreak.
Because you'd think after all that death, the
universe might finally cut him a break. It did
not. This is the story of Hatsuyo Ito. Okay,
so he meets her in Tokyo, right? He's 20 now.
He's made it to university. He's trying to have
a normal life. Yes, and he falls deeply, madly
in love. And from all accounts, it seemed to
be reciprocal. In 1921, they actually got engaged.
Wow. He was ready to restart his life. He was
ready to finally build the family that he had
lost. And then just one month later. She breaks
it off. And this is the part that drives me crazy.
The why. I was digging through all the sources.
I was looking for a scandal. Did he cheat? Did
her parents object? What was it? The historical
record is maddeningly vague. It just says unclear
reasons. She wrote of a letter ending it and
she cited some vague emergency or impossibility.
It was abrupt. It was absolute. And it was unexplained.
In a way, that has to be more damaging than a
death. How so? Because death is inevitable. It
happens to you. But rejection, that's a choice
someone makes. Precisely. It confirmed his deepest,
darkest fear that he was fundamentally unlovable
or that he was just destined to be alone. And
we know for a fact he never really recovered
from this because of a discovery made very, very
recently. The unsent letter. Yes. In 2014, researchers
were going through his former residence in Kamakura,
and they found a letter. It was addressed to
Hatuyo. It was written presumably around the
time of the breakup or maybe shortly after. But
he never mailed it. The fact that he kept it.
For 50 years, he held on to that physical artifact
of his pain for his entire life. It's devastating.
And there's another layer to it. Hatsuyu actually
died in 1951 at age 44. But Kawabata didn't even
know she was dead until 1955. So he was living
with a ghost for four years without even knowing
it. He was living with a ghost his whole life.
And he put that ghost to work. This relationship
is the direct inspiration for The Dancing Girl
of Izu. And you can argue it's the template for
almost every tragic romance he ever wrote. He
took that raw, bleeding wound and turned it into
high art. Okay, so let's pivot to that art. Because
there's a huge misconception we need to clear
up right away. We've established he's this tragic
figure, right? He's the ultimate orphan. So when
he starts writing in the 1920s at the University
of Tokyo, you'd expect him to write these sad,
traditional stories about samurais or, I don't
know, tea ceremonies. You would, but you'd be
completely wrong. He was a rebel. He was a punk
in a literary sense. He co -founded a movement
literary school called the Shinkangakuha. Shinkangakuha.
Okay, that is a mouthful. What does that actually
mean? Well, it's often translated as neo -impressionism,
but scholars really hate that translation. A
much better one is the New Sensation School or
the New Perception School. New Sensations. Okay,
so what were they trying to do? What was so new
about it? You've really got to understand the
battlefield of 1920s Japanese literature. On
one side, you had the old guard, the naturalists.
These were the hardcore realists. They wanted
to describe life exactly as it was, gritty, boring,
flat. Think of it as a black and white documentary.
The goal was objectivity. Then on the other side.
You had the proletarian literature movement,
the Marxists. For them, literature had one job,
to be a tool for social revolution. It was essentially
propaganda. Workers of the world unite in literary
form. So Kawabata looks at the boring realists
on one side and the angry communists on the other
and just says, no, thanks. Exactly. He and his
group basically said art is not a camera and
art is not a weapon. Art is a sensation. The
Shinkan Kakuha group was absolutely obsessed
with European modernism. Like what? Cubism, expressionism,
daddyism. Hold on, daddyism. As in the absurdity
movement from Zurich? That seems so incredibly
far removed from the whole beautiful, lyrical
Japan image we have of him. It is. But it's absolutely
crucial. Kawabata wanted to write sentences that
felt like a cubist painting looks. He wanted
to smash reality into fragments and then reassemble
it based on feeling, not logic. So how do you
do that in writing? I mean, give me a technical
example. What does that look like on the page?
Well, one technique they used was dropping grammatical
particles to create this jarring, sped -up rhythm.
But the big one was mixing the senses and what's
called anthropomorphism. Giving human qualities
to inanimate objects. Precisely. So instead of
writing, I felt sad when I looked at the flower,
a Shinkankakua writer, like Kawabata, might write
something that translates to, the flower's silver
grief pierced my eye. Wow. So the flower itself
possesses the grief. Exactly. The boundary between
the observer and the object is dissolved. It
becomes subjective, psychological, almost hallucinatory.
This wasn't just theory either. He was actively
writing in this style. He wrote screenplays for
experimental films. Like a page of madness. Yes.
He wrote the script for A Page of Madness in
1926. I've seen clips of that film. It's set
in an asylum. It's silent. It's terrifying. There
are all these masks and distorted stream of consciousness
visuals. And that is the real young Kalabata.
He wasn't some old monk meditating in a garden.
He was an avant -garde experimenter. He was trying
to find a brand new way to see the world. Because
the old way, the way of his family, the way of
tradition, had died along with his grandfather.
So he takes this new sensation toolkit, this
fragmented sensory modernist style, and he aims
it directly at his own trauma. And that collision,
that's what produces the masterpieces. That's
where the magic happens. We have to dive deep
into these because this is the body of work that
eventually wins him the Nobel. Let's start with
the one that made him famous. The Dancing Girl
of Izu. Published in 1926. This is the story
that pretty much every Japanese student reads
in high school. It's iconic. And the plot is
deceptively simple. A student who is, let's be
honest, basically Kawabata. Oh, absolutely. It's
thinly veiled autobiography. Is on a walking
tour of the Izu Peninsula. He's feeling melancholy.
He's got the orphan blues, if you will. And he
comes across a troupe of traveling performers.
And specifically. a young dancer in that troupe.
She's very young, barely an adolescent. And the
student feels this immediate rush of, well, it's
hard to pin down. It's not just lust. It's attraction,
affection. It feels like the dawning of eroticism,
but it's always kept at a very safe distance.
Distance is the key word for his entire body
of work. He walks with them, he talks to them,
but he never really crosses the line. There's
this beautiful scene where he's at a hot spring
and he sees her waving to him from across a ravine
and he realizes her innocence. And that realization
kind of cleanses him. But the ending, it's not
a happily ever after situation. No, it's the
opposite. He gets on a boat to go back to Tokyo.
She stays on the shore. They part ways forever.
And as the boat pulls away, he just cries. He
just weeps uncontrollably. It's that specific
Kawabata flavor, isn't it? The beauty is in the
separation. Yes. If he had stayed, if they had
tried to have a relationship, it would have been
ruined by reality. The fact that it ended, the
fact that it's just a memory makes it perfect.
It's that Hatsuyo Yututrama all over again. The
only safe love is a love that leaves you. Exactly.
And he takes that theme and he just perfects
it in what many people consider his absolute
masterpiece. Snow Country. Yuki Guni. This is
the big one. If you're going to read only one
book by Kawabata, this is probably it. It's a
novel he worked on for over a decade, from 1935
all the way to 1947. And it is a novel of breathtaking
coldness and beauty. Let's set the scene for
you. We are in the snow country. That's the western
side of the Japanese Alps, where the snow gets
incredibly, incredibly deep in the winter. The
opening sentence is one of the most famous in
all of modern literature. The train came out
of the long tunnel into the snow country. The
earth lay white under the night sky. It just
immediately transports you. It's like you go
through this dark tunnel, a birth canal maybe,
or a passage to the underworld, and you emerge
into this white, silent, frozen world. And in
this world, we meet our protagonist, Shimomura.
He's a Tokyo dilettante. He's wealthy. He's married.
But he is profoundly bored with his life. And
he's this expert in Western ballet. But here's
the kicker. He has never actually seen a ballet.
He just reads about it in books and writes about
it. Which is the ultimate irony, right? He prefers
the idea of the dance, the fantasy of it, to
the reality of the sweat and the muscles and
the effort. He lives in a world of abstraction.
So this guy who lives entirely in his head travels
to this remote hot spring town in the snow country
and meets Komako, who is a provincial geisha.
And Komako is one of the most vivid characters
in all of Japanese literature. She's described
as being incredibly clean, almost shining with
a kind of purity. But she's also messy. She drinks
too much. She falls in love too hard. She bites
her arm in frustration. She's just pure, hot,
vibrant life. And Shimomura, how does he treat
this vibrant life force? He watches her. He studies
her. It's like she's a beautiful bug in a jar.
There's this recurring phrase he uses, both in
his mind and out loud, to describe her life and
especially her love for him. He calls it wasted
effort. Wasted effort. That is so unbelievably
crude. It's devastatingly cool. She pours her
heart out to him. She practices the shamisen
until her fingers bleed. She walks through blizzards
just to see him for an hour. And he looks at
all this passion and thinks it's beautiful because
it's futile. He knows he's going back to his
wife in Tokyo. He knows he's going to leave.
He knows she's trapped forever in this snowbound
town. Her passion is beautiful to him specifically
because it has no future. It's an aesthetic object
for him to appreciate and then discard. There's
a scene early in the book that I think perfectly
captures that Shinkankakuha style we were talking
about. The train window scene. Oh, the window
scene is pure literary magic. So Shimomura is
on the train at night looking out the window
at the dark evening landscape flowing by. But
because it's dark outside and lit inside, the
window is also a mirror. So he can see the reflection
of a girl's face in the glass. A different girl,
Yoko, who is also on the train. Right. So he's
seeing two things at once. The mountains and
the fields are moving through her reflected face.
It's a superimposition. A double exposure. Exactly.
And at one point, he sees a light in the distance,
a fire or a lamp out in the fields. And it signs
directly through the reflection of her eye. And
he thinks, the eye turned into a strange, unearthly
fire. It's cubism in prose. He's seeing her internal
beauty and the external coldness of the world
simultaneously. And that defines his entire relationship
with the world. He's always watching the reflection,
never the reality. And that's why the book is
such a masterpiece of isolation. Even when he
and Kouanka were in bed together making love,
he's a million miles away. analyzing the aesthetics
of the situation. It's chilling. It really is.
So if Snow Country is about this cold, beautiful
isolation, the next big novel, A Thousand Cranes,
kind of brings that toxicity indoors into the
family. Yes. Published between 1949 and 1951,
this book takes the sacred Japanese tea ceremony
and, well, it basically drags it through the
mud. I think most Westerners have this very specific
idea of the tea ceremony. It's pure. It's zen.
It's this quiet, holy moment. It is supposed
to be. There are four principles, wakasijaku,
harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. But
Kawabata asks a really disturbing question. What
if the people holding the beautiful tea bowls
are morally terrible? The plot is, I mean, it's
like a dark soap opera. It's very soapy. It's
very Freudian and messy. The protagonist, a young
man named Kikuchi, goes to a tea ceremony and
ends up getting involved with the mistress of
his own dead father. And then he's also attracted
to her daughter. It's a mess. It's a complete
mess. But look at how Kawabata handles the objects,
the tea bowls, the water jar, the tea caddy.
There's a famous scene involving a specific Shino
water jar and a generic tea bowl. He describes
these ceramic objects as having a life, a history,
a soul of their own. And he contrasts the permanence
and purity of the bowls with the frailty and
ugliness of the people using them. That's the
core of the novel. The bowls are hundreds of
years old. They are perfect. They've been passed
down through generations. But the humans. We
are jealous, we engage in adultery, we die, we
rot. The ugliness of human affairs is set against
the timeless beauty of the tea tools. It almost
feels like the objects are judging the people.
I think they are. Kawabata is asking, can beauty
truly exist if the moral center is completely
rotten? The tea ceremony in this book isn't a
sanctuary from the world. It's a trap. It's a
stage where the ghosts of the past, the dead
father, the mistresses, come back to haunt the
living through these inanimate objects. It's
incredibly claustrophobic. And speaking of claustrophobic
family dynamics, let's talk about The Sound of
the Mountain. This is often called his most mature
work. It's set in Kamakura, which is where Kawabata
actually lived for much of his life. And the
protagonist Shingo is an old man, and he starts
hearing things at night. He hears the sound of
the mountain. It's this deep, rumbling roar that
seemingly only he can hear. And he interprets
it as the announcement of his own approaching
death. This book feels so incredibly modern to
me because it deals with what we'd now call the
sandwich generation problem. Shingo is deeply
disappointed in his adult children. Deeply. His
son is a serial cheater. His daughter is in a
failed marriage and has moved back home. He looks
at his own offspring and he just sees failure.
A legacy of unhappiness. It's a fear of obsolescence,
isn't it? He's aging. His memory is starting
to slip. He feels no real passion for his wife
anymore. And the only person in the house that
he feels a real connection with is his daughter
-in -law, Kikuko. The son's wife. Right. And
here we go again with that forbidden, impossible
connection. He's attracted to her. But it's layered.
It's not just a simple attraction. The book reveals
that he's drawn to her because she reminds him
of his wife's sister. a woman he was secretly
in love with in his youth, the Hatsuyu figure
rearing her head again. He is an old man reaching
for a phantom from his past through a taboo relationship
in the present. And just like in Snow Country,
nothing happens in the typical Hollywood sense.
They don't run away together. There's no big
dramatic confrontation. No. They just exist in
this quiet state of shared longing and unspoken
understanding. He watches a sunflower follow
the sun across the sky and feels the immense
tragedy of nature. It's a book about the quiet
terror of getting old and realizing you never
really connected with anyone the way you wanted
to. Okay, now we have to talk about The Outlier.
The one book that's completely different from
all the others. The one that actually has a clear
winner and a clear loser. The Master of Go. This
is the book that Kawabata himself considered
his finest work. And it's fascinating because
it's a chronicle novel. It's based on a real
Go match that he was assigned to report on for
the Manichi newspaper back in 1938. And for any
listeners who don't know Go, it's a board game.
But saying that is like saying war is just a
disagreement. It's infinitely complex. It's about
territory control. It's about life and death
on a grid. And this particular match, this was
the Super Bowl of the Japanese mind. You had
the reigning master, Shusai. He was the last
of the old school. He represented feudal Japan,
tradition, and almost divine intuition for the
game. And you had the challenger, Otake, who
was based on a real player named Minoru Kitani.
He was young, modern, rational. He played by
the clock. He represented the new scientific
Japan. And this match took... months to play
right it took forever they would play for a few
hours then the referee would call time they would
seal the next move in an envelope and everyone
would go home for days or weeks the master was
very sick he was dying and Kawabata was there
watching every single move and the outcome the
master loses the tradition loses the modern era
wins and the master dies about a year later he
does and the critical interpretation which is
almost universally accepted, is that this is
a massive symbolic parallel to the defeat of
Japan in World War II. The invincible Japan,
the master, losing to the cold, rational, industrial
mechanics of the modern world, the challenger.
It is an elegy, but not for a person. It's an
elegy for an entire culture. In his other books,
the loss is personal and lyrical. In this book,
the loss is national and devastatingly final.
So we have this incredible body of works no country,
thousand cranes, the master of go. And then in
1968, the Nobel Committee in Sweden looks at
all of this and says, this is it. This expresses
the essence of the Japanese mind. Which is a
pretty heavy weight to put on one person's shoulders.
No kidding. His acceptance speech is titled Japan,
the Beautiful and Myself. And I really want to
dig into this for a minute because it sounds
like it could be a tourist brochure, but it's
actually a deep philosophy lecture. It is a profound
defense of ambiguity. He spends most of the speech
talking about Zen Buddhism, but not the California
Zen of just relaxing and feeling good. He talks
about the Zen of discipline and emptiness. He
uses this incredible phrase. He says, the heart
of the ink painting is in space, abbreviation,
what is left undrawn. And that right there is
the deep dive takeaway for his entire style.
When you read Kalabata, you have to read the
white space on the page. He believed that if
you describe everything, if you explain every
motivation, you kill the imagination. You have
to leave room for the reader to enter the story.
He compares it to Ikebana, Japanese flower arranging.
Where the empty space between the branches is
just as important as the flowers themselves.
It's more important than some schools of thought.
That's where the beauty is. But then, in the
middle of this beautiful, serene speech about
flowers and empty space, he drops a bomb. He
starts talking about suicide. He does. It's quite
jarring. He discusses his friend, the famous
writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who had killed himself
decades earlier. And Kawabata says, Pretty explicitly,
however alienated one may be from the world,
suicide is not a form of enlightenment. So he
rejects it. He condemns it. He seems to. But
then, almost immediately after, he quotes the
eccentric Zen priest Ikki who said, Wow. Is there
one who does not think of suicide? That question
just hangs over the rest of the speech. It's
like he's admitting that the darkness is always
there, lurking right underneath all the beauty.
And that leads us, inevitably, to the final mystery.
The last unfinished chapter of his own life.
April 16th, 1972. Four years after winning the
Nobel Prize. Kawabata is found dead in his work
apartment in Zushi. He had gassed himself. Now,
the immediate reaction, especially in the West,
is, of course, he did it. He followed the pattern
of so many other writers. But the source material
we have says it's much more controversial than
that. It is deeply controversial in Japan. The
main reason is that he left no note. Zero. Nothing.
This is a man who wrote millions of words, a
master of expressing the most subtle nuances
of the heart. And he left nothing to explain
his final act. His widow, Hideko, always claimed
it was an accident, right? She did. She maintained
until her death that he was just clumsy, that
he was maybe preparing a bath and mistakenly
unplugged the gas tap. And many of his close
friends supported that theory. They said he seemed
normal, even happy in his final days. But there
are these darker currents. There were rumors
of an illicit affair. And more concretely, he
had just been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
And for a writer, that's a death sentence. He
was terrified of losing his ability to hold a
pen. To write. And then there's the giant shadow
hanging over everything, the Mishima factor.
Yukio Mishima. The brilliant, flamboyant, controversial
rock star of Japanese literature. He was Kawabata's
protege and friend. And in 1970, two years before
Kawabata's death, Mishima committed ritual suicide
seppuku after a failed coup attempt at a military
base. It was bloody, it was public, it was theatrical
and shocking. It was the polar opposite of everything
Kawabata stood for. How did Kawabata take it?
It absolutely broke him. He was one of the first
people to identify the body. He went to the morgue,
and afterwards, his biographer, Takeo Okuno,
said that Kawabata was relentlessly haunted.
He told Okuno that he had nightmares about Mishima
for two or three hundred nights in a row. Two
or three hundred nights. Imagine that. For almost
a year, every single night, you're seeing the
specter of your friend's violent death. He started
telling friends that he hoped his plane would
crash. When he was traveling, he was passively
seeking death. The shock of Mishima's very loud,
very political suicide seems to have just hollowed
him out. But the way he died, it was so different
from Mishima. Mishima stood on a balcony and
screamed at the world. Kawabata just turned on
a tap and faded out. And that's the crucial difference.
Mishima wanted to make a statement. His death
was a final grand performance. Kawabata, it seems,
just wanted to disappear. His death was silent.
It was private. It was in a very tragic way,
very Kawabata. It was an ending that... wasn't
an ending. It was just a cessation. Like his
books, they don't resolve, they don't tie everything
up in a neat bow, they just stop. Exactly. Snow
Country ends in the middle of a fire in chaos.
Thousand Cranes ends on a note of deep uncertainty.
His life ended in silence, leaving only questions.
So let's bring this all back to the present.
Why should you, our listener, driving to work
or walking the dog in 2026, care about a quiet
Japanese man who wrote about tea bowls and snow
back in the 1930s? What's the takeaway? I think
it's because we have lost the appreciation for
the unfinished. We live in a world that absolutely
demands closure. We binge watch shows because
we need to know how it ends. We want clear answers,
happy endings, definitive takes. Social media
forces us to have a strong opinion on everything
instantly. And Kawabata's entire body of work
says, just slow down. You don't need a neat answer.
He says there is profound beauty in the uncertainty.
He teaches us to look at what he called the wasted
effort. The failed relationships, the unfinished
projects, the moments of loneliness. And to see
them not as failures, but as art. He validates
the sadness in a way that's incredibly powerful.
It's the power of negative space. In a world
that is just getting louder and louder and louder,
he's the silence. And silence is where the truth
usually hides. I want to leave you with one final
thought. We talked about that quote he used in
his Nobel speech from the priest Ickes. Among
those who give thoughts to things, is there one
who does not think of suicide? It's a dark, troubling
question. It is. But maybe we can flip it. Among
those who give thoughts to things, is there one
who does not find beauty in the void? Kawabata
didn't leave a suicide note. He left us a Nobel
Prize -winning bibliography. He left the final,
most important page undrawn. And maybe, as he
told us in his speech, that's where the real
heart of the painting lies. A haunting but beautiful
way to think about it. Thanks for traveling to
the snow country with us. We'll see you on the
next Deep Dive.