Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata (?? ?? Kawabata Yasunari, June 14, 1899 - April 16, 1972) was a Japanese novelist whose spare, lyrical and subtly shaded prose won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. He became the first Japanese, and third Asian (after Rabindranath Tagore and Shmuel Yosef Agnon), to win the award. His works have had broad and lasting appeal, and are still widely read internationally.

Artistic career

He had hoped to become a painter when he was a boy, but some of his first stories were published when he was in high school, and he decided to become a writer instead. While still a student at the University, he joined Yokomitsu Riichi in starting Bungei Jidai (The Artistic Age), a neo-Impressionist journal.

Related Topics:
Yokomitsu Riichi - Impressionist

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He started to achieve recognition with a number of short stories shortly after he graduated, and achieved acclaim with "The Dancing Girl of Izu" in 1926, a story which explored the dawning eroticism of young love. Most of his future works explored similar themes of love.

Related Topics:
The Dancing Girl of Izu - 1926

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His first novel was Snow Country, started in 1934, and first published in installments from 1935 through 1937. Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha, which takes place in a remote hot-spring town somewhere on the west of the Japanese Alps. It established Kawabata as one of Japan's foremost authors and became an instant classic, described by Edward G. Seidensticker as "perhaps Kawabata's masterpiece".

Related Topics:
Snow Country - 1934 - 1935 - 1937 - Geisha - Japanese Alps - Edward G. Seidensticker

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After the end of World War II, his success continued with novels such as Thousand Cranes (a story of ill-fated love), The Sound of the Mountain, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, and Beauty and Sadness (his last novel, also a story of passion with a dark ending).

Related Topics:
Thousand Cranes - The Sound of the Mountain - The House of the Sleeping Beauties

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The book which he himself considered his finest work, The Master of Go (1951) is a severe contrast with his other works. It is a semi-fictional recounting of a major Go match in 1938, which he had actually reported on for the Mainichi newspaper chain. It was the last game of the master Sh?sai's career, and he lost to his younger challenger, to die a little over a year later. Although it is moving on the surface, as a retelling of a climactic struggle some readers consider it a symbolic parallel to the defeat of Japan in World War II.

Related Topics:
The Master of Go - 1951 - Go - 1938 - Sh?sai

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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.

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