"Before I continue to pour out my soul, let me confide in you that Lebanon is one of those countries that produces nothing but its own periodic tragedies." --"Dear Mr Kawabata," by Rashid al-Daif

BEIRUT -- Yasunari Kawabata's mark on the literary world did not fade much after he died by his own hand in a gas-filled room in 1972. Such was the universal regard for his work that, 23 years later, a Lebanese author would address a novel in Arabic to the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer.

"Dear Mr Kawabata," however, is not a belated fan letter, but Rashid al-Daif's semi-autobiographical account of a boy growing up poor in a Christian Maronite mountain village who falters on the Marxist road he sets out on as an adult.

To steer his story, the narrator -- also called Rashid -- evokes the Japanese author, punctuating the book with asides and rhetorical questions directed to a mute sounding post utterly removed from his own reality -- Kawabata is not Arab, not Christian and, most noticeably, not alive.

"To choose a Japanese," explains al-Daif, "is to manifest a critical attitude toward the Arab culture. If you're going to confess something, it has to be to somebody who is neutral and is ready to listen."

He couldn't address his thoughts to a Westerner "because between the Westerners and Arabs there's a great deal of hostility."

Al-Daif first read Kawabata -- in French -- toward the end of Lebanon's 15-year civil war. The Japanese author treated themes in his novels that also preoccupied al-Daif. One of his favorite books, "The Master of Go," although considered fiction, is a manipulation of Kawabata's own newspaper reports in 1938 about a titanic game of "go" between an aging grand master and a talented younger challenger. The tension between tradition and modernity saturates the novel.

A similar theme helps to bind "Dear Mr Kawabata," which was translated into English last year. In one shameless episode, the young Rashid -- empowered by secular schooling and the recent news that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has orbited the Earth -- tries to goad a God-fearing neighbor into acknowledging that the Earth revolves around the sun. The elderly man pummels the narrator for his arrogance, giving the boy his first glimpse of what a sniper's bullet will hammer home later in the book: that the notion of one set of truths overcoming all others is a dangerous illusion.

Like the book's protagonist, al-Daif was wounded, nearly fatally, at the start of the war. From across a cafe table, a faint mark is still visible above his shirt collar where shrapnel struck him in the neck. He is reluctant, however, to label his book autobiographical.

"I could have made a novel out of a journalist's report, for example, but a newspaper report could not have conveyed the emotional charge of what was going on," he says, echoing perhaps Kawabata's own thinking about "The Master of Go." "My reality could be expressed only through literature, therefore fiction was the closest to my reality."

Al-Daif's animated hands softly ply the air in unison with his French sentences. Although he speaks some English, his desire for accuracy means that an American friend, a fellow academic at the Lebanese University in Beirut, is translating.

The trail that lead al-Daif to Kawabata's books is easy to map. French colonialists brought their language to this part of the Levant -- Beirut was known as the "Paris of the Middle East" before bullets and bombs ravaged the capital -- and Japanese authors, who are adored in France, are heavily translated into French.

Like his narrator, al-Daif studied at a university in France and returned home with a crystallized view that socialism would be Lebanon's savior. But both the author's and his protagonist's beliefs were rocked in the early years of a wildly factional war that proved "thinking has nothing to do with reality," says al-Daif.

Kawabata's final act suggests that the Japanese author came to this conclusion too, according to al-Daif. Although spurred by depression and a failing body, Kawabata's "discreet" suicide -- at age 73 -- stands in contrast to the actions of fellow Japanese who, during World War II, followed the spirit of their times to seemingly pointless deaths.

"Kawabata committed suicide not for a cause, gratuitously," says al-Daif, "but because he was attracted by nothingness, and in our tradition we're always dying for a cause. We're always dying for something to such an extent that there is an incredible inflation of martyrs."

In trying to tame the phantoms of his past, al-Daif has conjured up another ghost -- a Japanese one that will pique the interest of Japanese readers, if the novel ever lands a Japanese publisher. But al-Daif stresses that his book is not a contribution to the debate on Yasunari Kawabata, and he can only chuckle when told that the sole English translation of "Dear Mr Kawabata" in one Tokyo bookstore was shelved among the novels of the Nobel laureate.