Kawabata Yasunari
| Yasunari Kawabata | |
|---|---|
Kawabata at his home in Kamakura
|
|
| Born |
11 June 1899 Osaka, Japan |
| Died | 16 April 1972 (aged 72) Zushi, Kanagawa, Japan |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Ethnicity | Japanese |
| Citizenship | Japanese |
| Period | 1924–1972 |
| Genre | novels, short-stories |
| Notable awards |
Nobel Prize in Literature 1968 |
Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成 Kawabata Yasunari?, 11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
Born in Osaka, Japan, into a well-established doctor's family, Yasunari was orphaned when he was four, after which he lived with his grandparents. He had an older sister who was taken in by an aunt, and whom he met only once thereafter, at the age of ten (July 1909) (she died when he was 11). Kawabata's grandmother died when he was seven (September 1906), and his grandfather when he was fifteen (May 1914).
Having lost all close relatives, he moved in with his mother's family (the Kurodas). However, in January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near the junior high school (comparable to a modern high school) to which he had formerly commuted by train. Through many of Kawabata’s works the sense of distance in his life is represented. He often gives the impression that his characters have built up a wall around them that moves them into isolation. In a 1934 published work Kawabata wrote: “I feel as though I have never held a woman’s hand in a romantic sense[…] Am I a happy man deserving of pity?”. Indeed, this does not have to be taken literally, but it does show the type of emotional insecurity that Kawabata felt, especially experiencing two painful love affairs at a young age. One of those painful love episodes was with Hatsuyo Ito (, 1906-1951) whom he met when he was 20 years old. His unsent love letter to her was recently found at his former residence in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture. According to Kaori Kawabata, Kawabata's son-in-law, an unpublished entry in the author's diary mentions that Hatsuyo was raped by a monk at the temple she was staying at, which led her to break off their engagement.
After graduating from junior high school in March 1917, just before his 18th birthday, he moved to Tokyo, hoping to pass the exams of Dai-ichi Kōtō-gakkō (First Upper School), which was under the direction of the Tokyo Imperial University. He succeeded in the exam the same year and entered the Humanities Faculty as an English major (July 1920).
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