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Kawabata Yasunari on Cinema

This coming week I will be attending an international conference in Paris on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Kawabata Yasunari. Entitled "Relire Kawabata au 21e siècle - modernisme et japonisme au-delà des mythes," it will take place on September 17 and 18, 2014, at the Maison de la culture du Japon (for the first day) and the Université Paris Diderot (on the second day). It will feature some of the top literature scholars in Japan, Europe, and the United States, including Michael Bourdaghs, Kensuke Kono, Hirokazu Toeda, Hirofumi Wada, Yuko Brunet, Tomi Suzuki, and Cécile Sakai (who is the main organizer). The novelist Tawada Yoko will give a talk on the evening of the first day. Click here for the program (in French). 

My own interest in Kawabata is rather long held. One of my first published articles, "Celluloid Masks: The Cinematic Image and the Image of Japan" (in Iris 16 [Spring 1993]: 23-36), considered how Kawabata's and Tanazaki Jun'ichiro's literary representations of cinema connected to their constructions of Japan. And of course my second book, A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan, is about the film Kawabata was individually involved in making. 

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