Yasunari Kawabata

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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 in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.

Early life

Born into a well-established family in Osaka, Japan, Kawabata was orphaned by the time 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, in July 1909, when he was ten. She died when Kawabata was 11. Kawabata's grandmother died in September 1906, when he was seven, and his grandfather in May 1914, when he was fifteen.

Having lost all close paternal relatives, Kawabata 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. After graduating in March 1917, Kawabata moved to Tokyo just before his 18th birthday. He hoped to pass the exams for 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 in July 1920. The young Kawabata, by this time, was enamoured of the works of another Asian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.

One of Kawabata's painful love episodes was with Hatsuyo Ito (伊藤初代, 1906–1951), whom he met when he was 20 years old. An unsent love letter to her was found at his former residence in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 2014. According to Kaori Kawabata, Kawabata's son-in-law, an unpublished entry in the author's diary mentions that Hatsuyo was raped by a monk at the temple she was staying at, which led her to break off their engagement.

While still a university student, Kawabata re-established the Tokyo University literary magazine Shin-shichō (New Tide of Thought), which had been defunct for more than four years. There he published his first short story, "Shokonsai ikkei" ("A View from Yasukuni Festival") in 1921. During university, he changed faculties to Japanese literature and wrote a graduation thesis titled "A short history of Japanese novels". He graduated from university in March 1924, by which time he had already caught the attention of Kikuchi Kan and other noted writers and editors through his submissions to Kikuchi's literary magazine, the Bungei Shunju.

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Career

After graduating, Kawabata began receiving accolades for a few of his short stories, including "The Dancing Girl of Izu," a tale about a melancholy student who, on a walking trip down Izu Peninsula, meets a young dancer and returns to Tokyo in much better spirits. The work explores young love's dawning eroticism, but also shades of melancholy and even bitterness, which contrasts what might otherwise be a sweet tale. The majority of his subsequent works followed similar themes.

Kawabata was born in Asakusa, Tokyo's plebeian district, in the 1920s. During this period, Kawabata experimented with new writing styles. 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 that recalls late Edo period literature. On the other hand, his Suisho genso (Crystal Fantasy) is pure stream-of-consciousness writing. He was also involved in the script for the experimental film A Page of Madness.

Kawabata demonstrators marched in Tokyo against the detention, torture, and death of young leftist writer Takiji Kobayashi by Tokk' special police in 1933.

In 1934, Kawabata moved from Asakusa to Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, and although he initially enjoyed a lively social life among the many other writers and writers in the city during the war years and immediately thereafter, in his later years, he became very reclusive.

Snow Country, one of Robert Frost's most well-known books, was first published in installments from 1935 to 1937. Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in a remote hot-spring town in northern Japan's mountainous regions. It established Kawabata as one of Japan's top writers and became an instant classic, according to Edward G. Seidensticker, who called Kawabata's masterpiece "probably Kawabata's masterpiece."

Kawabata's popularity soared after the end of World War II with titles such as Thousand Cranes (a tale of ill-fated love), The Sound of the Mountain, The Sleeping Beauties, Beauty and Sadness, and The Old Capital.

Thousand Cranes (serialized 1949–1951) and The Sound of the Mountains (serialized 1949–1954) were two of his two most influential postwar works. The Japanese tea ceremony and hopeless love are two main themes in Thousand Cranes. After her death, the protagonist is attracted to his mistress and her daughter, who have fled from him. The tea ceremony provides a stunning backdrop for tumultuous human affairs, but Kawabata's aim is rather to explore feelings about death. The tea ceremony utensils are reusable and permanent, while people are infant and fleeting. In The Sound of the Mountain, set in Kawabata's adopted home of Kamakura, the themes of implicit incest, inexorable love, and impending death are explored once more. The protagonist, an elderly man, has become dissatisfied with his children, and he no longer has a zealous passion for his wife. He is immediately attracted to someone forbidden – his daughter-in-law – and his hopes for her are interspersed with memories of another forbidden passion for his deceased sister-in-law.

The book, which Kawabata himself regarded as his best work, The Master of Go (1951), contrasts sharply with his other works. It's a semi-fictional recounting of a big Go contest in 1938, in which he had actually worked for the Mainichi newspaper chain. It was the last game of master Shsai's career, and he lost to his younger competitor, Minoru Kitani, but only after a year. Although the book is a dramatic retelling of a climactic conflict, some readers see it as a logical analogy to World War II's defeat of Japan.

The sense of loneliness in his life is conveyed through several of Kawabata's works. He has often said that his characters have constructed up a wall around them, putting them into loneliness. "I feel as though I have never taken a woman's hand in a romantic sense," Kawabata wrote in a 1934 publication. "Am I a happy man deserving of pity?" True, this does not have to be taken literally, but it does show the type of emotional turmoil that Kawabata felt, particularly when being involved in two difficult love affairs at a young age.

Many of Kawabata's stories are obviously unfinished, often to the annoyance of readers and reviewers, but it goes hand in hand with his aesthetics of art for art's sake, rejecting any sentimentalism or morality that a book's ending would have. This was done deliberately, as Kawabata believed that vignettes of events along the way were far more relevant than conclusions. He likened his writing style to Japan's traditional poetry, the haiku.

Kawabata has also worked as a reporter, most notably for the Mainichi Shimbun. Despite the fact that he did not participate in World War II's militaristic fervor, he nonetheless showed no interest in postwar political reforms. Kawabata said that the war was one of his most influential influences on his work, as well as the deaths of all his relatives when he was young, and that writing only elegies in postwar Japan was unattainable. Despite this, some commentators observe that there has been no change in the prewar and postwar writings in Kawabata.

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