Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose sparse, lyrical, and impressionistic prose won him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first ever awarded to a Japanese author. Orphaned by age four and losing all close relatives by his teens, Kawabata lived with a deep sense of solitude that infused his work with delicate melancholy and traditional Buddhist concepts of impermanence (mono no aware).

A founder of the Neo-Sensualist (Shinkankakuha) avant-garde group, Kawabata achieved international renown with Snow Country (Yukiguni), depicting the fleeting love affair between a wealthy dilettante and a provincial geisha in an isolated mountain hot spring town. Other masterworks include Thousand Cranes, centered on the tea ceremony, and The Master of Go. His Nobel citation praised his 'narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind'.