Kawabata Yasunari

Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), Japanese novelist, born in Ōsaka, and educated at Tokyo Imperial University. In the 1920s he belonged to a group of young writers known as neosensationists, who favored lyricism and impressionism over the prevalent social realism. He gradually evolved his own painstaking, episodic style. He frequently concerned himself with the exploration of loneliness and of the outer fringes of human sexuality. His novel Snow Country (trans. 1956), about a self-centered businessman and a loving geisha, is best known to Western readers. Other works are the novels Thousand Cranes (trans. 1959) and The Sound of the Mountain (trans. 1970); a volume of short stories; and The Master of Go, a fictional memoir (posthumously pub. 1972). Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize in literature, the first Japanese to do so; he was cited for his “narrative mastership, which with great sensibility expresses the Japanese mind.” Ill and depressed, he took his own life in 1972.