ABSTRACT
I begin this analysis in “Myth-making” with the more prosaic task of describing how literary and artistic conventions function in Kawabata’s modern texts. Next, in Chapter 2, “Fascist aesthetics,” I explain in some detail how I comprehend and use the term “fascist aesthetics.” “Kawabata and fascist aesthetics” brings the first two chapters together and compares the specific mobilization of signifiers of tradition by Kawabata with the structural conventions of fascist aesthetics. Here, in order to show from what constellations of ideology those conventions emerge and signify, the study also turns its attention to a broader analysis of related contemporaneous sociocultural, religious, and literary issues. Throughout these chapters, Japan, and sometimes the notion of a unified thing called the East, stand in the place of the self, while the place of the other is occupied by a (homogenized and monolithic) West. Chapter 4, “Virgins and other little objects,” embarks on the more theoretical problematic of how the narrative gaze relates to the other as individual (for Kawabata, most commonly women) and what it might share and not share with fascist aesthetics in this ethics – or apprehension of the other. This chapter also attends to a psychoanalytic reading of the narrative gaze.
