The Writing Background of Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is Kawabata Yasunari's later work. Its absurd content confuses readers. Exploring the deep connotation of Sleeping Beauty is indispensable for grasping Kawabata Yasunari's whole creation. If we contact Yasunari Kawabata's whole creation before Sleeping Beauty, understand the themes he has repeatedly played in different forms in other works, and clarify its development context, we will clearly see the coordinates of this important work. The "Oedipus Complex" and "Worship of the Virgin" that existed at the beginning of Kawabata Yasunari's creation, the explanations of "demonization" and "Buddha" in the 1950s, and the idea of "reincarnation of life and death" throughout his life are all expressed in Kawabata Yasunari's poetic style. It is self-evident that the works exude the decadent mood of modernism. But it also reflects Kawabata Yasunari's unique thinking on the philosophy of life with oriental cultural traditions. The whole article is full of Zen, which is a typical work that Kawabata Yasunari can't ignore.

After Kawabata Yasunari became a husband, he also admitted his fear of getting married and having children, especially his fear that his weakness would also lead to deformity of children. This is the deformation and extension of Kawabata Yasunari's orphan feelings, which is called "no pregnancy" complex. In Sleeping Beauty, Jiangkou had two dreams after taking medicine for the first time. It is not difficult to see that they are all subconscious manifestations of "not pregnant" phobia. This fear is reflected in many writers' works, such as Junichiro Tanizaki's After Being a Father, and there are also words similar to Kawabata Yasunari. In Sleeping Beauty, Jiangkou hugs (combines) with a four-legged woman and is chopped after Jiangkou's daughter gives birth to a deformed child. This seemingly abrupt plot, if connected with Kawabata Yasunari's deep psychology, can be used as the key for the writer to leave readers out of the maze. Because of this, Kawabata Yasunari lived for so long until his twilight years (he didn't expect to live for so long), and this sense of orphan has been with him, not only not erased, but deepened. In addition, it seems that his life is doomed to what course he will take from his emergence in the literary world (he attended Ito Hiroshi's funeral shortly before his death). Because of this, his heart turned to Buddhism, and when he met spirituality, his heart was always haunted by a sense of return, which is completely understandable. Through Kawabata Yasunari's artistry, this sense of return has become the yearning for the spiritual hometown of mankind in the past. The so-called worry is the inevitable problem of fate after human beings move from natural person to cultural person (the definition is time-limited). Kawabata Yasunari's orphan feelings are related to his profound thinking on human problems. To this end, he opened man and the universe in his room, from an individual to a "nothing" universe. This is fully reflected in Sleeping Beauty. He showed a kind of reverse thinking, that is, knowing life from death and knowing existence from nothing.

In addition, Kawabata Yasunari's morbid psychology cannot be ignored. A writer is a person with different personalities, and even his physique and interests should be reflected in his works. As a researcher who studied Kawabata Yasunari from the perspective of pathology said, "When Kawabata Yasunari wrote Ancient Capital (he was hospitalized in the Department of Internal Medicine of Dongdachong), his insomnia lasted for 4 1 year (1962), which was a manifestation of the deterioration of some symptoms before his death. From a medical point of view, insomnia and suicide are quite close. " Kawabata Yasunari's orphan feelings, accompanied by the twilight years of patients with this serious nervous system, can be imagined in its complex colors.