"Begonia flowers wake up" means that human beings are small and ordinary, but we are alive. We live solemnly and beautifully with a small and hard life, just like this bright and blooming little flower.

This sentence comes from Kawabata Yasunari's essay Flowers Never Sleep. Kawabata Yasunari once woke up at 4 a.m. and found that the begonia flowers were awake. He told himself: If a flower is beautiful, then I will live.

Thematic features

Nihility and pessimism are the themes of modernist literature. Kawabata Yasunari claimed to be "baptized by modern western literature" and also expressed the theme of pessimism and nothingness in his novels, but his pessimism and nothingness are quite different from the former.

Nihilism and pessimism in western modernist novels are mainly manifested in the vacancy of values and the disillusionment of self-consciousness. However, Kawabata Yasunari's nihility and pessimism are not based on the absurdity of real life, nor are they manifested through the vacancy of values and the disillusionment of self-consciousness. But through an unrealistic and abstract environment to express the impermanence of life, and the concept of "killing me for nothing is liberation" is closely related to Kawabata Yasunari's Zen consciousness.