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Portrait of Yasunari Kawabata

Literature · Novelists

Yasunari Kawabata

1899–1972 · Japanese

Shinkankakuha — the New Sensation school

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1968. Orphaned young, he wrote spare, elliptical novels of loneliness, ageing and unequal desire, steeped in the aesthetics of the tea ceremony, ink painting and the game of go. He was a mentor to Yukio Mishima, and died by apparent suicide in 1972, less than two years after Mishima's own death.

How to spot them

  • ▸First Japanese Nobel laureate in literature, 1968; his lecture was "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself"
  • ▸Hot-spring inns, geishas, snow country on the west coast, Kyoto and Kamakura
  • ▸The New Sensation school (Shinkankakuha) of the 1920s
  • ▸Mentor and champion of Yukio Mishima
  • ▸"Palm-of-the-hand stories": very short fictions written throughout his career

Key works

The Izu Dancer (1926)

A student walking the Izu peninsula falls in with a troupe of travelling entertainers and a young dancer

Snow Country (1937)

Yukiguni — the Tokyo dilettante Shimamura and the hot-spring geisha Komako; it opens with a train emerging from a long tunnel into snow

Thousand Cranes (1952)

Sembazuru — the tea ceremony as the setting for a man's entanglement with his dead father's mistresses

The Sound of the Mountain (1954)

Yama no Oto — the ageing Shingo hears the mountain and senses death approaching, while his family disintegrates

The Master of Go (1954)

A documentary-style novel on the 1938 retirement match of the great Honinbo Shusai, which Kawabata had covered as a reporter

House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961)

Old Eguchi visits a house where elderly men sleep beside drugged young women; it later prompted a novel by García Márquez

The Old Capital (1962)

Koto — twin sisters separated at birth in postwar Kyoto, and the city's festivals through the year

Key ideas

  • Mono no aware: beauty inseparable from transience and loss
  • Emptiness and "nothingness" as a Buddhist rather than a nihilistic value, as he insisted in his Nobel lecture
  • Narrative pared back to images, leaving connections for the reader to make

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 11 June 1899 in Osaka; both parents were dead before he was three, and he was raised by a blind grandfather
  • •A founder of the magazine Bungei Jidai and of the Shinkankakuha, or New Sensation school
  • •He wrote Snow Country in instalments from 1935 and did not settle its final form until 1948
  • •The first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1968
  • •His Nobel lecture, delivered in Japanese, was titled "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself"
  • •He served as president of Japanese PEN and helped Yukio Mishima's career; Mishima had been nominated for the Nobel himself
  • •He covered the 1938 retirement match of the go master Honinbo Shusai for the Mainichi newspapers, the basis of The Master of Go
  • •He died on 16 April 1972 at Zushi, apparently by suicide by gas, leaving no note
  • •Kenzaburo Oe, Japan's second literature laureate in 1994, titled his own lecture "Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself" in reply

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources