ABSTRACT
To bring the previous two chapters into some sort of a dialogue, I want first to return to the dominance of the so-called natural in Kawabata’s texts, which, as I have already noted, is nowhere wild and rampant; it is the cultured garden, tamed by the human hand, or the mountains made docile in poetry. Objects (and women) seen in mirrors or through glass, for example, are transformed into what they should or could be, which surpasses that which they are. I want to stress that this “ought” however, is inherent in the type of contemplation by the subject rather than in a transformation of the object itself.
