Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata started to achieve recognition for a number of his short stories shortly after he graduated,
receiving acclaim for "The Dancing Girl of Izu" in 1926, a story about a melancholy student who, on
a walking trip down Izu Peninsula, meets a young dancer, and returns to Tokyo in much improved
spirits. This story, which explored the dawning eroticism of young love, was successful because he
used dashes of melancholy and even bitterness to offset what might have otherwise been overly
sweet. Most of his subsequent works explored similar themes.
In the 1920s, Kawabata was living in the plebeian district of Asakusa, Tokyo. During this period,
Kawabata experimented with different styles of writing. In Asakusa kurenaidan (The Scarlet Gang of
Asakusa), serialized from 1929 to 1930, he explores the lives of the demimonde and others on the
fringe of society, in a style echoing that of late Edo period literature. On the other hand, his Suisho
genso (Crystalline Fantasy) is pure stream-of-consciousness writing. He was even involved in writing
the script for the experimental film A Page of Madness.[7]
In 1933, Kawabata protested publicly against the arrest, torture and death of the young leftist
writer Takiji Kobayashi in Tokyo by the Tokkō special political police.
Kawabata relocated from Asakusa to Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1934 and, although he
initially enjoyed a very active social life among the many other writers and literary people residing in
that city during the war years and immediately thereafter, in his later years he became very
reclusive.
One of his most famous novels 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 in the mountainous
regions of northern Japan. 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".
After the end of World War II, Kawabata's 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; Beauty and Sadness; and The Old Capital.
His two most important post-war works are Sembazuru (Thousand Cranes) from 1949 to 1951,
and Yama no Oto (The Sound of the Mountain), 1949–1954. Sembazuru is centered on the tea
ceremony and hopeless love. The protagonist is attracted to the mistress of his dead father and,
after her death, to her daughter, who flees from him. The tea ceremony provides a beautiful
background for ugly human affairs, but Kawabata's intent is rather to explore feelings about death.
The tea ceremony utensils are permanent and forever, whereas people are frail and fleeting. These
themes of implicit incest, impossible love and impending death are again explored in Yama no Oto,
set in Kawabata's home town of Kamakura. The protagonist, an aging man, has become
disappointed with his children and no longer feels strong passion for his wife. He is strongly attracted
to someone forbidden — his daughter-in-law — and his thoughts for her are interspersed with
memories of another forbidden love, for his dead sister-in-law.
The book that he himself considered his finest work, The Master of Go (1951), contrasts sharply with
his other works. It is a semi-fictional recounting of a major Go match in 1938, on which Kawabata
had actually reported for the Mainichi newspaper chain. It was the last game of the master Shūsai's
career and he lost to his younger challenger, only to die a little over a year later. Although the novel
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.
Kawabata left many of his stories apparently unfinished, sometimes to the annoyance of readers and
reviewers, but this goes hand to hand with his aesthetics of art for art's sake, leaving outside any
sentimentalism, or morality, that an ending would give to any book. This was done intentionally, as
Kawabata felt that vignettes of incidents along the way were far more important than conclusions. He
equated his form of writing with the traditional poetry of Japan, the haiku.

Awards[edit]
As the president of Japanese P.E.N. for many years after the war (1948–1965), Kawabata was a
driving force behind the translation of Japanese literature into English and other Western languages.
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 1960, and awarded
Japan's Order of Culture the following year.

Nobel Prize[edit]

Kawabata in 1968

Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 16 October 1968, the first Japanese
person to receive such a distinction. [8] In awarding the prize "for his narrative mastery, which with
great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind", the Nobel Committee cited three of
his novels, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital.[9]
Kawabata's Nobel Lecture was titled "Japan, The Beautiful and Myself" (美しい日本の私―その序
説). Zen Buddhism was a key focal point of the speech; much was devoted to practitioners and the
general practices of Zen Buddhism and how it differed from other types of Buddhism. He presented
a severe picture of Zen Buddhism, where disciples can enter salvation only through their efforts,
where they are isolated for several hours at a time, and how from this isolation there can come
beauty. He noted that Zen practices focus on simplicity and it is this simplicity that proves to be the
beauty. "The heart of the ink painting is in space, abbreviation, what is left undrawn." From painting
he moved on to talk about ikebana and bonsai as art forms that emphasize the simplicity and the
beauty that arises from the simplicity. "The Japanese garden, too, of course symbolizes the vastness
of nature."[10]
In addition to the numerous mentions of Zen and nature, one point that was briefly mentioned in
Kawabata's lecture was that of suicide. Kawabata reminisced of other famous Japanese authors
who committed suicide, in particular Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. He contradicted the custom of suicide
as being a form of enlightenment, mentioning the priest Ikkyū, who also thought of suicide twice. He
quoted Ikkyū, "Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of
suicide?" There was much speculation about this quote being a clue to Kawabata's suicide in 1972,
two years after Mishima had committed suicide.[citation needed]

Death[edit]
Kawabata apparently committed suicide in 1972 by gassing himself, but a number of close
associates, including his widow, consider his death to have been accidental. One thesis, as
advanced by Donald Richie, was that he mistakenly unplugged the gas tap while preparing a bath.
Many theories have been advanced as to his potential reasons for killing himself, among them poor
health (the discovery that he had Parkinson's disease), a possible illicit love affair, or the shock
caused by the suicide of his friend Yukio Mishima in 1970.[11] Unlike Mishima, Kawabata left no note,
and since (again unlike Mishima) he had not discussed significantly in his writings the topic of taking
his own life, his motives remain unclear. However, his Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, has
related how he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was
incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima. In a persistently depressed state of mind, he would
tell friends during his last years that sometimes, when on a journey, he hoped his plane would crash.

Selected works[edit]

Kawabata c. 1932

Year Japanese Title English Title English

 Translation

伊豆の踊子
1926 The Dancing Girl of Izu 1955, 1998
Izu no Odoriko

浅草紅團
1930 The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa 2005
Asakusa Kurenaidan

1935–1937, 雪国
Snow Country 1956, 1996
1947 Yukiguni

名人
1951–1954 The Master of Go 1972
Meijin

千羽鶴
1949–1952 Thousand Cranes 1958
Senbazuru

山の音
1949–1954 The Sound of the Mountain 1970
Yama no Oto

みづうみ（みずうみ）
1954 The Lake 1974
Mizuumi

眠れる美女 The House of the Sleeping

1961 1969
Nemureru Bijo Beauties

古都
1962 The Old Capital 1987, 2006
Koto

美しさと哀しみと
1964 Utsukushisa to Beauty and Sadness 1975
Kanashimi to

1964 片腕 One Arm 1969

 Kataude

1964–1968,
Tampopo Dandelions 2017
1972

掌の小説
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories 1988, 2006
Tenohira no Shōsetsu