Kawabata Yasunari
Kawabata Yasunari (川端 康成, June 14, 1899 - April 16, 1972) was a Japanese novelist who became the second Asian and first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.
Kawabata was orphaned when he was two and lived with his grandparents. Kawabata's grandmother died when he was eight, his grandfather when he was sixteen, causing him to move to his mother's hometown. While still a student at Tokyo Imperial University he joined Yokomitsu Riichi in starting Bungei Jidai (The Artistic Age), a neo-Impressionist journal.
Kawabata committed suicide in 1972. Many theories have been advanced as for his reasons, for example poor health, a possible illicit love affair, or the shock caused by the suicide of his friend Mishima Yukio in 1970. However, unlike Mishima, Kawabata left no note and had not discussed it significantly in his writings, so his motives remain unclear.
Kawabata achieved acclaim with The Dancing Girl of Izu in 1927. In 1937, he completed the first version of his novel Snow Country, a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in a remote hot-spring town somewhere in the Japanese Alps. Snow Country established Kawabata as one of Japan's foremost authors and became an instant classic. After the end of World War II, his success continued with novels such as Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain, and The House of the Sleeping Beauties. As the president of Japanese P.E.N. for many years after the war, Kawabata was a driving force behind the translation of Japanese literature into English and other Western languages.
List of selected works
- The Dancing Girl of Izu (伊豆の踊り子 Izu no Odoriko 1927)
- Snow Country (雪国 Yukiguni, 1937)
- Thousand Cranes (千羽鶴 Senbazuru, 1949-52)
- The Sound of the Mountain (山の音 Yama no Oto, 1949-54)
- The Old Capital (古都 Koto, 1962)
- Beauty and Sadness (美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to, 1965)
- The Master of Go (名人 Meijin, 1972)
