Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, born in Osaka on 11 June 1899, was a Japanese novelist and short story writer. His restrained, lyrical, and subtly nuanced prose earned him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first time a Japanese author had received that honor. His books continue to be read widely and have found an international audience.

Kawabata came from a well-established family but was orphaned by age four. He then lived with his grandparents. His older sister was raised by an aunt; he saw her only once, in July 1909, when he was ten, and she died when he was eleven. His grandmother died in September 1906, when he was seven, and his grandfather in May 1914, when he was fifteen. After losing all close paternal relatives, he moved in with his mother’s family, the Kurodas. In January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near his junior high school, which he had previously commuted to by train. After graduating in March 1917, he moved to Tokyo just before turning eighteen, hoping to pass the entrance exams for the First Higher School, a university-preparatory institution that typically sent graduates to the University of Tokyo. He was admitted in September 1917. Unhappy with dormitory life at first, he took an eight-day trip to Izu in 1918, after which he got along much better with his dormmates. He then entered the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University in July 1920, studying English literature. At this time, the young Kawabata was deeply impressed by the works of fellow Asian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

A painful romantic episode involved Hatsuyo Itō (1906–1951), whom he met at age twenty. They became engaged in 1921, but she broke it off a month later for unclear reasons. Kawabata never fully recovered from this loss. Hatsuyo may have inspired works such as the novella *The Dancing Girl of Izu* and several *Palm-of-the-Hand Stories*. She died from complications of a stroke in 1951 at age forty-four, but Kawabata was not told until 1955. An unsent love letter to her was discovered at his former Kamakura residence in 2014. While still a university student, Kawabata revived the Tokyo University literary magazine *Shin-shichō* (New Tide of Thought), which had been defunct for over four years. He published his first short story, “Shokonsai ikkei” (“A View from Yasukuni Festival”), there in 1921. He later switched to Japanese literature and wrote a graduation thesis titled “A short history of Japanese novels.” He graduated in March 1924, by which time he had already caught the attention of Kikuchi Kan and other noted writers through submissions to Kikuchi’s magazine *Bungei Shunju*.

In October 1924, Kawabata, Riichi Yokomitsu, and other young writers launched a new literary journal, *Bungei Jidai* (The Artistic Age). This was a reaction against the entrenched old school of Japanese literature, particularly the Naturalist tradition, and also opposed the proletarian literature movement of Socialist and Communist schools. It was an “art for art’s sake” movement, influenced by European Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, and other modernist styles. The term *Shinkankakuha*, which Kawabata and Yokomitsu used for their philosophy, is often mistranslated as “Neo-Impressionism.” It actually focused on offering “new sensations” or “new perceptions” in writing. An early example is the draft of *Hoshi wo nusunda chichi* (The Father who stole a Star), an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s play *Liliom*.

Shortly after graduating, Kawabata gained recognition for several short stories, especially “The Dancing Girl of Izu” in 1926. That story follows a melancholy student who, on a walking trip down the Izu Peninsula, meets a young dancer and returns to Tokyo in better spirits. It explores the dawning eroticism of young love but includes melancholy and bitterness, preventing it from becoming overly sweet. Most of his later works explored similar themes. In the 1920s, he lived in Tokyo’s plebeian Asakusa district and experimented with different styles. *Asakusa kurenaidan* (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa), serialized from 1929 to 1930, examines the lives of the demimonde and fringe society in a style echoing late Edo period literature. His *Suishō gensō* (Crystal Fantasy) is pure stream-of-consciousness writing. He also worked on the script for the experimental film *A Page of Madness*. He met his wife Hideko (née Matsubayashi) in 1925, and they registered their marriage on 2 December 1931. In 1933, he publicly protested the arrest, torture, and death of leftist writer Takiji Kobayashi by the Tokkō special political police. He moved from Asakusa to Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1934. Though he was socially active among the many writers living there during and just after the war, he became very reclusive in later years. One of his most famous novels is *Snow Country*.