Nobody seems to have been very curious about this previously, but they've now figured out that, as Manabu Hoshino reports in The Asahi Shimbun, Kawabata's unpublished adaptation of short novel is about father's love, as:
A neglected manuscript by the late Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata turns out to be an unpublished novella adapted from a Hungarian play.Yes, bizarrely:
Curators were aware the manuscript existed but had not studied it in any detail. All they knew was that it was an adaptation of Liliom, a work by Hungarian author Molnar Ferenc (1878-1952) which served as a basis for the Broadway musical and movie Carousel.At 22 handwritten pages and as an adaptation it doesn't appear to be a major work (though you figure somebody would have checked this out more closely at some point ...)., but anything by the master is certainly welcome.