Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned in early childhood. Raised by his grandparents, he lost his grandmother when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen; his only sister had died too. The solitude of these years left a lasting imprint on his work. He studied literature at Tokyo Imperial University, and in 1924, with Riichi Yokomitsu and others, he founded a journal associated with the Shinkankakuha, or New Sensationalist school, which sought fresh perception through modernist techniques.

His novella The Dancing Girl of Izu (1926), about a student’s encounter with a young travelling performer, brought early fame. Snow Country, published in instalments from 1935 and revised for years afterwards, tells of a Tokyo dilettante’s affair with a geisha at a remote hot-spring resort, its scenes linked by association like the movements of renga poetry. After the war came Thousand Cranes, set around the tea ceremony; The Sound of the Mountain, in which an ageing man senses the approach of death; and The Master of Go, a chronicle of a championship match that Kawabata considered his finest work. Later novels such as The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Beauty and Sadness explored desire and ageing with unsettling restraint. He also wrote many very short ‘palm-of-the-hand’ stories.

Kawabata served as president of the Japan P.E.N. Club and became a mentor to the young Yukio Mishima. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize, delivering a lecture on Japanese beauty and Zen. In April 1972 he was found dead from gas inhalation in his workroom at Zushi; his death is widely presumed to have been suicide.