ABSTRACT
Fiction of Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, has been examined in terms of biographical criticism, modernism, discontinuity, psychology, aestheticism, traditionalism, "evil", narcissism, and elegy. This chapter introduces some of Kuwabara Takekazu's critical perspectives regarding the dominant trends that he observes in approaches to and evaluations of modern Japanese writers and their works. Gwenn Petersen examines the novel from the perspective of Kawabata's interest in what in our terms would be called the transgenerational transmission of trauma, "At one level, Thousand Cranes is a story of sickness—a theme made clear by the title's allusion to the paper birds of origami". In Thousand Cranes, Kawabata shows his readers what can happen when people who have been traumatized by the transgressions and deaths of loved ones fail to come to terms with critical issues of blame and responsibility or constitute, work through, and mourn their successive losses.
