Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, a Japanese novelist and short-story writer, became the first author from Japan to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His writing is known for being spare, lyrical, and filled with subtle shades of meaning, and his books continue to be read widely around the world.

Kawabata was born in Osaka into a well-established family, but by the time he was four years old, both his parents had died. He then lived with his grandparents. His older sister was taken in by an aunt; Kawabata saw her only once, in July 1909, when he was ten, and she died when he was eleven. His grandmother died when he was seven, in September 1906, and his grandfather died in May 1914, when Kawabata was fifteen. After losing all his 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 his eighteenth birthday, hoping to pass the entrance exams for the First Higher School, a university-preparatory school that sent most graduates to the University of Tokyo. He was admitted in September 1917. At first, he found dormitory life unsatisfying, so he took an eight-day trip to Izu in 1918, after which he got along much better with his dormmates. After finishing at the First Higher School, he entered the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University in July 1920, studying English literature. By this time, the young Kawabata was deeply fond of the works of Rabindranath Tagore, another Asian Nobel laureate.

One painful romantic episode involved Hatsuyo Itō, whom he met when he was twenty. They became engaged in 1921, but only a month later, she broke off the engagement for unclear reasons. Kawabata never fully recovered from losing her. She may have inspired some of his works, including the novella *The Dancing Girl of Izu* and several *Palm-of-the-Hand Stories*. Hatsuyo died from complications after a stroke in 1951 at age forty-four, but Kawabata was not told until 1955. In 2014, an unsent love letter to her was found at his former home in Kamakura. 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. During university, he switched to studying 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 attracted the attention of Kikuchi Kan and other noted writers through submissions to Kikuchi’s literary 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 established old school of Japanese literature, particularly the movement descended from Naturalism, and also opposed the proletarian literature movement of the 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 was not about updating Impressionism but focused on offering "new sensations" or "new perceptions" in literature. An early example from this period is a draft of *Hoshi wo nusunda chichi* (The Father who stole a Star), an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s play *Liliom*.

Shortly after graduating, Kawabata began to gain recognition for his short stories. He received acclaim for "The Dancing Girl of Izu" in 1926, a story about a melancholy student who, on a walking trip down the Izu Peninsula, meets a young dancer and returns to Tokyo in much better spirits. The work explores the dawning eroticism of young love but includes shades of melancholy and bitterness that offset what might otherwise have been an overly sweet story. Most of his later works explored similar themes. In the 1920s, Kawabata lived in the plebeian Asakusa district of Tokyo, where he experimented with different writing styles. In *Asakusa kurenaidan* (The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa), serialized from 1929 to 1930, he explored the lives of the demimonde and others on society’s fringe in a style echoing late Edo period literature. In contrast, *Suishō gensō* (Crystal Fantasy) is pure stream-of-consciousness writing. He also helped write the script for the experimental film *A Page of Madness*. Kawabata 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 the young leftist writer Takiji Kobayashi by the Tokkō special political police in Tokyo. Kawabata moved from Asakusa to Kamakura in 1934. Although he initially had a very active social life among the many writers and literary people living there during and just after the war, in his later years he became very reclusive. One of his most famous novels, *Snow Country*, was started during this period.