An orphaned Osaka novelist perfected hush on the page
Yasunari Kawabata (11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) wrote spare, shaded Japanese prose that won him the Nobel. Orphaned by age four and raised by grandparents in Osaka, he met his sister only once afterward—a childhood of absences that critics still hear in the silences of his fiction.
His grandmother died when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen; the sister he saw once, at ten, died a year later. Left with his mother's family, the Kurodas, he boarded near his school from 1916, moved to Tokyo shortly before turning eighteen and entered the elite First Higher School. An eight-day trip to Izu in 1918 eased his unhappiness in the dormitory. He enrolled at Tokyo University in 1920 in English literature, admired Tagore, later switched to Japanese literature, and revived the defunct student magazine Shin-shichō, where his first story appeared in 1921.
That year he became engaged to Hatsuyo Itō, who broke it off a month later for reasons never clear. He never fully recovered; she may have inspired his Izu dancer novella and some of his very short palm-sized tales, he learned of her 1951 death only in 1955, and an unsent love letter to her turned up at his Kamakura home in 2014. Even his birthday wavered: letters found in 1971 supported the 14 June date in the family register, so he held a second party.
With Riichi Yokomitsu he launched Bungei Jidai in 1924, an art-for-art's-sake journal opposed to both Naturalism and proletarian writing and drawing on Cubism, Expressionism and Dada; their label Shinkankakuha means new sensations, not neo-Impressionism. Living in Tokyo's working-class Asakusa, he chronicled its demimonde in The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, tried stream of consciousness in Crystal Fantasy and helped script the film A Page of Madness.
He married Hideko Matsubayashi, protested in 1933 the police killing of the leftist writer Takiji Kobayashi, and moved to Kamakura in 1934, growing reclusive later. Snow Country, serialised from 1935, follows a Tokyo dilettante and a geisha in a northern hot-spring town; Edward Seidensticker thought it perhaps his masterpiece. The Sound of the Mountain and Beauty and Sadness came after the war.
Source: Yasunari Kawabata
