Yasunari Kawabata (1899 - 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short-story writer whose restrained, elliptical prose made him one of the leading figures of twentieth-century Japanese literature. [1] In 1968 he became the first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for narrative mastery expressing the essence of the Japanese mind. [2] His best-known works include Snow Country, Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain.
Early life
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka on 11 June 1899. [1] He was orphaned in early childhood, losing both parents before he was four, and his grandmother and sister died soon afterwards; he was raised by his grandfather, who died when Kawabata was fifteen. The successive bereavements left him effectively alone as a teenager and became a persistent undercurrent in his writing.
He studied Japanese literature at Tokyo Imperial University, graduating in 1924, and began publishing while still a student. His early autobiographical story The Izu Dancer, drawn from a walking trip as a young man, appeared in 1926 and established his reputation. [3]
Literary career
In the 1920s Kawabata was associated with the Shinkankakuha, or New Sensationalist school, a modernist group influenced by European avant-garde writing that sought fresh forms of perception and expression. He also worked as a critic and editor, and was noted for encouraging younger writers. [1]
Snow Country, written in instalments between 1935 and 1947, is his most celebrated novel: an account of a Tokyo dilettante's affair with a geisha at a remote hot-spring resort, told in fragmentary, imagistic scenes. [3] Thousand Cranes uses the tea ceremony as a framework for a study of inherited guilt and desire, while The Sound of the Mountain follows an ageing man's intimations of death and his attachment to his daughter-in-law. The Old Capital is set in Kyoto and concerns tradition and identity in a changing city.
Kawabata also wrote very short pieces he called "palm-of-the-hand stories", composed throughout his career, which distil his methods into a page or two. [1]
Public role and honours
Kawabata served as president of the Japanese PEN Club from 1948 and was active in bringing Japanese literature to international attention through translation. [2] Among many Japanese honours he received the Noma Literary Prize, the Kikuchi Kan Prize, the Japan Art Academy Prize and the Order of Culture, and he was recognised as a Person of Cultural Merit.
The Nobel Prize in 1968 marked the first award of the literature prize to a Japanese writer. In his Nobel lecture, Japan, the Beautiful and Myself, he discussed classical Japanese aesthetics, Zen and the poetry of the medieval monks. [2]
Death and legacy
Kawabata was deeply affected by the suicide in 1970 of his friend and protégé Yukio Mishima. He died in Zushi on 16 April 1972, apparently by his own hand, though he left no note and some who knew him questioned whether the death was intentional. [1]
His work is now widely translated and is read internationally as a principal expression of modern Japanese prose, combining an avant-garde sensibility with classical Japanese ideas of transience and beauty. [3]
