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Thousand Cranes Essay

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Moreover, in Kawabata’s novels, he explores sensuality and death. In Thousand Cranes, Kawabata presents themes that are twisted yet perverse. The story involves incest, eroticism, and unrequited love. Charged sexual energy, guilt, and dread warp the characters into caricatures of the optimistic adolescents that they were at the beginning of the novel. Throughout the novel, Kawabata capitalizes on dramatic sexuality and death (). In “The Izu Dancer,” the main character, a young man who is eerily similar to Kawabata, idealizes a fledgling dancer that he encounters, neglecting to acknowledge the grotesqueness that peeks from behind her flirtatious mask (). The story ends on a bitter note; the main character parts from the dancer, echoing …show more content…
House of the Sleeping Beauties possesses themes of inevitable death, senility versus youth, and nostalgic love. These themes are relevant to Kawabata, who was growing old, experienced heartbreak, and had seen all of his close family die when he was young. Kawabata formulated the plot for House of the Sleeping Beauties by drawing from his personal experience of having withdrawals from sleep medication which caused him to drift between sleep and wakefulness (Haruki 434). Eguchi possesses a multitude of similarities to Kawabata. Emulating Kawabata, Eguchi was elderly, orphaned, and bereft of his lovers. The themes of eroticism and death that permeate the novel, both in its premise and culmination, feign the romantic pursuits of Kawabata’s adulthood and the tragedies of his childhood. Kawabata ends The House of the Sleeping Beauties very abruptly, not providing much resolution to readers, which makes sense if one views the novel as a chronicle of his life. Kawabata’s life had not ended; therefore, there would be no clear ending to the story. Evidently, House of the Sleeping Beauties evidently a manifestation of Kawabata’s internal conflict over age and

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