YASUNARI KAWABATA
(1899-1972)
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka to a family that was far from wealthy despite its aristocratic origins. His childhood was a litany of loss: his father, a frail and scholarly doctor, died when he was two, his mother when he was three. Going to live with his grandparents near Osaka, he soon lost his grandmother and his sister and was left alone with his blind grandfather.
A delicate boy who often missed school, Kawabata preferred to bury himself in the Japanese classics rather than to play with his peers. Despite a conviction that he, too, was destined for an early death, he resolved to become a writer in his early teens. Gessel (1993, 144) describes him as "determined to be a success, if only to restore to the family some of the dignity and property lost in his grandfather's day." When his grandfather eventually died in 1914, the teenage Kawabata was left with no close family.
Kawabata moved to Tokyo in 1917 to attend high school, then, in 1920, enrolled in the English Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. There he helped resurrect Shinshich6, the literary magazine in which Tanizaki had made his debut a decade earlier. Kawabata was to be actively involved with literary magazines throughout his life. He also sat on the first-ever jury for the Akutagawa Prize in 1935 and helped launch the careers of many writers, including the young Yukio Mishima.
Kawabata's own career started to take offin the mid-1920s. A 1925 account of his grandfather's last days was followed the next year by The Izu Dancer, the story of an unconsummated love affair between a high school student and a young dancing girl. Perennially popular, it established what was to be a recurring theme in Kawabata's oeu- vre: "the discovery of a younger, impoverished, virginal girl by an urban, well-educated male" (Cabell 2001, 153). Kawabata also wrote the screenplay for A Page of Madness, a film set in a lunatic asylum, produced a number of prose vignettes called "palm-of-the-hand" stories, and serialized The Scarlet Gang ofAsakusa, a collage-style portrait of life in the dancehalls and cafes of Tokyo's entertainment district.
In 1934, Kawabata began work on Snow Country. The story of the hopeless relationship between a wealthy Tokyoite and a geisha at a hot-spring town in the mountains of Niigata, it was published first in 1937, then in a revised version in 1948. Kawabata's methodof producing his novels was unconventional. He would never write a book straight through; instead he would write a section, publish it, then add more when inspiration visited, only declaring it finished when he felt the work had finally achieved its proper form.
Kawabata's work is sometimes described as "expressing the essence of the lapanese mind" (Osterling 1968), his oblique and fragmented mode of storytelling seen as more akin to haiku poetry than conventional prose narrative. One must, however, be careful about sentimentalizing him into no more than the flail and nostalgic exponent of traditional Japanese beauty. A pioneer of the Neo-Perceptionist school in the 1920s, Kawabata consciously tried to import the techniques of European modernism into lapanese literature, while spare dialogue, an almost total absence of exposition, and sudden shifts in time and place owe much to the techniques of the cinema.
During the war, Kawabata was called on to perform various duties by the militarist government: editing the writings of soldiers about to go into battle, touring lapan's conquests in China--even spending April 1945 in Kagoshima with the kamikaze corps. It has been suggested that Seidensticker's portrayal (1973, vii) of Kawabata as a man who would "have nothing of jingoistic wartime hysteria" may be more wishful thinking than fact.
As Japan crashed to humiliating defeat, Kawabata set up a publishing company to reissue prewar literary masterpieces and publish a magazine to showcase new writing talent. The early 1950s saw Kawabata himself publish The Master of Go, Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain. True to his famous remark that "after the war he could write nothing but elegies," these uniformly pessimistic masterpieces deal with death, deceit and the decline of tradition. Later works from the 1960s such as "The House of the Sleeping Beauties" address the emotional isolation and physical impotence that afflict men in old age.
Kawabata's works started to be translated in the mid-1950s and his reputation--bolstered also by his tireless efforts as an ambassador for Japanese literature--spread overseas. International recognition culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1968, but Kawabata's health was in decline, and the 1970 suicide of his protege, Mishima, had hit him hard. In the evening of April 16, 1972, Kawabata went to his writing room in Kamakura and gassed himself to death.
(1899-1972)
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka to a family that was far from wealthy despite its aristocratic origins. His childhood was a litany of loss: his father, a frail and scholarly doctor, died when he was two, his mother when he was three. Going to live with his grandparents near Osaka, he soon lost his grandmother and his sister and was left alone with his blind grandfather.
A delicate boy who often missed school, Kawabata preferred to bury himself in the Japanese classics rather than to play with his peers. Despite a conviction that he, too, was destined for an early death, he resolved to become a writer in his early teens. Gessel (1993, 144) describes him as "determined to be a success, if only to restore to the family some of the dignity and property lost in his grandfather's day." When his grandfather eventually died in 1914, the teenage Kawabata was left with no close family.
Kawabata moved to Tokyo in 1917 to attend high school, then, in 1920, enrolled in the English Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. There he helped resurrect Shinshich6, the literary magazine in which Tanizaki had made his debut a decade earlier. Kawabata was to be actively involved with literary magazines throughout his life. He also sat on the first-ever jury for the Akutagawa Prize in 1935 and helped launch the careers of many writers, including the young Yukio Mishima.
Kawabata's own career started to take offin the mid-1920s. A 1925 account of his grandfather's last days was followed the next year by The Izu Dancer, the story of an unconsummated love affair between a high school student and a young dancing girl. Perennially popular, it established what was to be a recurring theme in Kawabata's oeu- vre: "the discovery of a younger, impoverished, virginal girl by an urban, well-educated male" (Cabell 2001, 153). Kawabata also wrote the screenplay for A Page of Madness, a film set in a lunatic asylum, produced a number of prose vignettes called "palm-of-the-hand" stories, and serialized The Scarlet Gang ofAsakusa, a collage-style portrait of life in the dancehalls and cafes of Tokyo's entertainment district.
In 1934, Kawabata began work on Snow Country. The story of the hopeless relationship between a wealthy Tokyoite and a geisha at a hot-spring town in the mountains of Niigata, it was published first in 1937, then in a revised version in 1948. Kawabata's methodof producing his novels was unconventional. He would never write a book straight through; instead he would write a section, publish it, then add more when inspiration visited, only declaring it finished when he felt the work had finally achieved its proper form.
Kawabata's work is sometimes described as "expressing the essence of the lapanese mind" (Osterling 1968), his oblique and fragmented mode of storytelling seen as more akin to haiku poetry than conventional prose narrative. One must, however, be careful about sentimentalizing him into no more than the flail and nostalgic exponent of traditional Japanese beauty. A pioneer of the Neo-Perceptionist school in the 1920s, Kawabata consciously tried to import the techniques of European modernism into lapanese literature, while spare dialogue, an almost total absence of exposition, and sudden shifts in time and place owe much to the techniques of the cinema.
During the war, Kawabata was called on to perform various duties by the militarist government: editing the writings of soldiers about to go into battle, touring lapan's conquests in China--even spending April 1945 in Kagoshima with the kamikaze corps. It has been suggested that Seidensticker's portrayal (1973, vii) of Kawabata as a man who would "have nothing of jingoistic wartime hysteria" may be more wishful thinking than fact.
As Japan crashed to humiliating defeat, Kawabata set up a publishing company to reissue prewar literary masterpieces and publish a magazine to showcase new writing talent. The early 1950s saw Kawabata himself publish The Master of Go, Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain. True to his famous remark that "after the war he could write nothing but elegies," these uniformly pessimistic masterpieces deal with death, deceit and the decline of tradition. Later works from the 1960s such as "The House of the Sleeping Beauties" address the emotional isolation and physical impotence that afflict men in old age.
Kawabata's works started to be translated in the mid-1950s and his reputation--bolstered also by his tireless efforts as an ambassador for Japanese literature--spread overseas. International recognition culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1968, but Kawabata's health was in decline, and the 1970 suicide of his protege, Mishima, had hit him hard. In the evening of April 16, 1972, Kawabata went to his writing room in Kamakura and gassed himself to death.
