ABSTRACT
In this chapter I shall examine four stories by Kawabata Yasunari, with a focus on the women who appear in these works and the issue of the strong and the weak. The four stories are The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926), Snow Country (1935-47; book published in 1948), Thousand Cranes (1949-51; book published in 1952) and The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54). Early Kawabata scholarship was largely the province of male commentators. Thus, in marketing material for Imamura Junko’s 1988 book, A Study of Kawabata Yasunari (Kawabata Yasunari kenkyE), Hasegawa Izumi noted that “To date the study of Kawabata has been developed from a male perspective and by male pens. [Imamura’s] book is the first monument built by a woman’s hand.”1
