‘The Rainbow’ Review: Yasumari Kawabata’s Quiet Revolution

Yasunari Kawabata was not the first modern Japanese novelist to be translated into English, but for many American readers he introduced a nation’s literary sensibility. When he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1968, he became the first Japanese laureate, an ascendancy that coincided with a cresting wave of exports from his country to the West—steel and cars and transistor radios, movies and toys and art. It’s no surprise that Kawabata was viewed as a benchmark: Here it was, the modern Japanese novel.

The first to arrive was “Snow Country,” in 1956, followed by “Thousand Cranes,” in 1958. Both novels were translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, whose introduction to “Snow Country” sought to assist Western readers who might find its trappings—country inns and geishas, kimonos and sake cups—disorienting. Seidensticker pointed out Kawabata’s ties to Japanese poetry: This was prose of a sere, haiku-like delicacy and suggestiveness, with much implied and little specified.