Kawabata’s first pages: I expected a Nobel-worthy prose, but I’m... surprised. Am I missing something?

Next on my reading queue was Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness. I picked it carefully, expecting a masterpiece from such a celebrated author. But I’m only a few pages in, and I’m already on the verge of disappointment.

It’s too soon to judge, of course, but so many little red flags have popped up already. Wait. Kawabata: 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature. It must be me, right? His works, including this novel, are so highly regarded.

So, I’m here to ask for help: What am I missing?

Just in case the reddit crowd goes "just read it and see yourself, etc". Fair, but I have my reasons for asking right away.

The quirks are in the prose. There's also a detail in the content I'm not happy with, but it's a matter of taste, so to speak. Regarding the prose, what repeatedly jumped at my face are:

• The "telling" instead of "showing". Ex: "He was sad, ..." "he was surprised ...", "made him feel lonely"x2, etc.
• The filtering, when the sensory description is filtered through the protagonist with perception verbs, to look, to see, to smell (I know they are not always filtering). Ex: "Oki looked ... and saw ...", "noticed", "He saw", "he could glimpse".
• On-the-nose descriptions. The irony is that I selected this novel for its theme of loneliness, but I got a triple serving of it right at the start. Heavily pushed, not subtle at all. The author slams my face down into the plate full of loneliness with isolation gravy and lonely topping. I got it.
• A style very close to "Oki did this", "Oki did that" (when not pushing on-the-nose descriptions).

Overall it's not just red flags I noticed: All those quirks weaken the prose. Such a gap with my previous reading.

About the content I mentioned :

It's a flashback, when they were lovers. She was 15—he took her first time, and the sweet flashback scene starts only after the act and goes on casually. It ends with the disclosure that he was 30 at that time! Bam! The reader was dragged along the scene, not really suspecting anything, leisurely reading with empathy, and then the trap closes on him, with the revelation. Disgusting. Except that it doesn't look wrong in the story yet. Man... Oki (MC) has an issue here. We shall see, but if the story goes as if nothing, then the author won't look good in my eyes. I'm fine with trapping the reader like that, being uncomfortable for the sake of the experience, for the ride the author has in mind, playing with us readers. But I can't help thinking Japanese media don't have a good record here, with their endemic and unhealthy fascination for youth. Sorry for the digression, longer than expected.

Anyway, back to the prose itself: I must be wrong. I wish I am.

Can someone explain to me, for instance, that for Beauty and Sadness, it's just a side effect of the translation and we get used to it, it has its charm, or it's deliberate—a meta something, or there's a better translation, or that I must not expect arbitrary rules to be followed when no master respects them, or that I'm blind to something else that eclipses all that, or anything.

Thanks!

(Btw: ESL and asking a genuine question; let me know if I need to adjust the post)