Alan Tansman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520245051
- eISBN:
- 9780520943490
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520245051.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Whiteness covered the landscape of literature and the arts in Japan in the 1930s, an aesthetic response to a deep cultural malaise. It suggested a moment of authenticity or purity beyond the ...
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Whiteness covered the landscape of literature and the arts in Japan in the 1930s, an aesthetic response to a deep cultural malaise. It suggested a moment of authenticity or purity beyond the fractured space of modern life. The most provocative repository of images of whiteness in the 1930s was Yasuda Yojūrō's “Japanese Bridges,” its effectiveness in its time a direct result of its uncannily apt expression of the endemic desire for a cure to cultural and spiritual loss while signaling the impossibility of satisfying that desire. This chapter discusses how writers like Yanagi Sometsu, Kawabata Yasunari, and Shiga Naoya were committed to real objects of art, but they also sought to recreate the spatial quality of those objects in the linear time of language and literature. This spatial quality took the form of an expressive use of images of whiteness and purity, which stood for Japanese authenticity.Less
Whiteness covered the landscape of literature and the arts in Japan in the 1930s, an aesthetic response to a deep cultural malaise. It suggested a moment of authenticity or purity beyond the fractured space of modern life. The most provocative repository of images of whiteness in the 1930s was Yasuda Yojūrō's “Japanese Bridges,” its effectiveness in its time a direct result of its uncannily apt expression of the endemic desire for a cure to cultural and spiritual loss while signaling the impossibility of satisfying that desire. This chapter discusses how writers like Yanagi Sometsu, Kawabata Yasunari, and Shiga Naoya were committed to real objects of art, but they also sought to recreate the spatial quality of those objects in the linear time of language and literature. This spatial quality took the form of an expressive use of images of whiteness and purity, which stood for Japanese authenticity.
