Rodica Frenţiu, Yasunari Kawabata: Dreams of the Floating World, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2023, 324 p.

Abstract

Literary interpretation is a complex art which always involves more than the work being analysed and can never be reduced to a decoding of the author’s thoughts. As obviously important as those two aspects are, delving into them exclusively would mean ignoring the author as a person, both in the sense of ignoring the influence of one’s life on one’s writing style and thematic choices, but also in the sense of ignoring the societal trends in thinking that inevitably affect all people within that context. This explanation was necessary as avoiding that mentality is one of the qualities of Rodica Frenţiu’s book, Yasunari Kawabata: Dreams of the Floating World (2023). The work becomes almost as much about Japanese history, society, culture and the language as about the renowned Japanese author himself, all in an effort to make it more accessible to a European reader, while keeping it a thorough interpretation that does justice to the alterity of Kawabata by not trying to naturalise and explain his thinking using Western concepts.