Philippine E-Journals

The Narrative Structure of the Noh Play in Yasunari Kawabata’s “The Izu Dancer”

Ma. Leilani C. Macatangay

Discipline: Literature

 

Abstract:

When one reads Kawabata's works, one should not look at how the elements, when combined, make a text meaningful, instead, one should look at what each individual element suggests.

 

Yasunari Kawabata is best known as the first, and at this point the only, Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Having this in mind, the non-Japanese reader would expect, after reading a work of Kawabata, to be able to understand better the Japanese and their way of thinking. However, this is not the case, as Van C. Gessel, a biographer of Kawabata, points out after reading Snow Country.