Quotes from Gwenn Boardman Petersen

Beauty is frequently symbolized in the person of a girl--sometimes passive, sometimes aggressive, but always passionate, although the passions may be only hinted at and expressed through traditional erotic symbolism.

But whether the death is that of a tubercular husband in "The Moon on the Water," a mystical figure such as Y?ko in Snow Country, or the drugged girl lying beside an old man in House of the Sleeping Beauties, death always has richly poetic implications in Kawabata's work, in contrast to the meticulously clinical deteriorations in Tanizaki's novels and the murderous destruction in Mishima's.