Shapers of Japanese History

Kawabata Yasunari: Finding the Harmonies Between Literature and Traditional Art　

Oct 1, 2021

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

Kawabata Yasunari won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature for works written with narrative mastery and sensibility. Academic Taniguchi Sachiyo explores the connections between art and Kawabata’s literary world.

What sparks the idea for a literary work? How is this transformed through the creative process into the text itself? While there may be many different answers to these questions, in some cases, inspiration comes from an encounter with a painting.

Shapers of Japanese History

Tea and Aesthetics: Kawabata Yasunari’s Nobel Lecture

Oct 13, 2021

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. In the lecture he gave at the award ceremony on December 12 that year, he surfaced the connections between his own writing and Japan’s traditional culture, including especially the tea ceremony.

Bilingual Author Tawada Yōko: Crossing Political and Linguistic Borders

Tawada Yôko / Écrire en deux langues pour la promotion d’une littérature mondiale

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

December 10, 2020

Tawada Yōko, a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes in both Japanese and German, has become one of the world’s leading literary voices, winning Germany’s Kleist Prize in 2016 and an American National Book Award in 2018.