無事說書 - 川端康成 Kawabata Yasunari

I love to read, but only few people around me know. I am struggling to talk with my friends about reading, on one hand, they dont like it. On the other hand, despite they like it, they only have interest to read books like "How to be rich", "How to make friend with somebody u hate" or "What if your father is 李嘉誠?". I reiterate that i am not going to condenm anything, i understand we all have freedom to choice, I just sometimes feel a kind of lonely. But i enjoy this kind of feeling, and in my university life, i was grateful to have some friends to talk with (e.g. Martin). I remembered at one time we used to talk about Kawabata Yasunari.

Snow Country (雪國) is the first Kawabata Yasunari (川端康成) book i read, and i have liked it the most with all Kawabata's books. The first is the best, it is always vaild to me. But i also like the other books by Kawabata as well, just like "The Old Capital", "The Sound of Mountain" and "Thousand Cranes". Ironically, i had not have a read of one of the most popular "The dancing Girl of lzu". Many alleged that Kawabata's works were some kinds of porns and self-destructive, claimed the life was meaningless and trival. It was fair enough to say the stories were sort of depression, sometimes it tried to give u a message that in front of your desperate life, no matter how u did, u just could not get any meaning out of it. But i had never ever thought that. I believed that what it's trying to say was totally different. Definitely you were not likely to get any meaning out of you life, just because the fact is: You are the one to give meaning to life. If you want to have a inclusive and versatile life, just do sth to make it: 人如果冇夢想, 咁同條咸魚有咩分別? Kawabata is saying that: Yes, maybe it is sort of useless, maybe it cannot benefit anything, maybe even it is totally wrong to do so, but you just do it because it is you "evidence of existence", and we thus can make a tough response to our desperate life.

Reading of Kawabata is a wonderful experience, as if u were not reading the words, instead u were looking at a screen. At the very beginning in "Snow Country", a men in a train looked at the window glass of the carriage. The glass reflected the image of the girl next to the men, collaborated the sights behind the glass, made a abstract and "transparent" picture. For something we often did in our daily, Kawabata made it in terms of symbolic and artistic. So you may found that you would want to stop, want to see, started to notice, look at the small things in your life after reading Kawabata. Remember, everything have its own meaning, but you need to find out.

For someone who loves Japan, wants to know more about Japan in terms of culture and spirit, Kawabata should be you favourite writer, and it is one of the points to win him the Noble Prize of Literature. But it is also good for leisure reading, at lease it is vaild to me.