Two or three images from Kawabata's novels: an "expert" on Western ballet who has never actually seen a ballet performed (Snow Country). A novelist who has his wife type up a novel about his own true-life love affair with a 16-year old girl. The emotional shock causes the typist/wife to miscarry (Beauty and Sadness). A brothel in which aged men can spend the night with prostitutes drugged unconscious. Taken together, these images compose a stunning condemnation of "masculinity" as a mode of errrant unknowing.