© Collection Petit

Yasunari KAWABATA

prix Nobel 1968

 

Yasunari Kawabata was born in 1899 in Osaka, Japan, to a prosperous and cultured family. His father, a doctor, was a refined man, interested in poetry and painting. But Kawabata's childhood was defined by a series of losses. In 1900 his father died of tuberculosis. In 1902, his mother succombed to the same illness. The child was taken in by his paternal grandparents. This transition marked the beginning of a relatively uneventful period for the young boy. His grandmother, however, died in 1906, then his sister in 1909. Kawabata was only nine years old. The sense of loneliness and closeness to death which is so present in the work of Kawabata doubtless has its origins in this childhood troubled by suffering. Over the course of his life, Kawabata would address letters to those parents of whom he had no memory. He would not be able to call them 'father' and 'mother', but rather "my deceased parents", "dead parents", "you who are for me today like the sound of the wind or the light of the moon."

For eight years after the death of his grandmother, Kawabata stayed with his grandfather, who was blind and infirm. Despite these difficulties, very close ties bound them. His grandfather died in 1914. The same year Kawabata wrote his journal, simply called The Journal of My Sixteenth Year. The text, considered to be his first literary work, was published in 1925.

Kawabata spent the next six months with his uncle, before enrolling at the Ibargi boarding school in January 1915. In 1916, as a prefect, he had authority over a young man, Kiyono, with whom he found love, and who he called "my homosexual love." This relationship is described in The Adolescent (1948).

In 1919, at the age of 20, he frequented a welcoming and enthusiastic literary circle who met in a fashionable cafe. There he met Hatsuyo, a young waitress, and decided, much to the astonishment of his friends, to marry her. A month into the engagement, however, Hatsuyo broke it off with no clear explanation.

She has, however, left her mark on the work of Kawabata, in the numerous female characters who inhabit his books, evoked on the surface of the text or haunting its depths. His pursuit of an ideal beauty reveals itself in the languid eroticism of his novels, where bodies are physically enthralling, but spectral and unapproachable. The sensual intimacy, which can exist between the characters, physically and emotionally, is delicately drawn in each of his books. The lyrical veneration for beauty is particularly striking in Snow Country (1948), The Lake (1954), Sleeping Beauties (1961), and Tampopo (1964).

In 1920 Kawabata began his literary studies at the University of Tokyo. He graduated in 1924, and with a group of young writers founded the journal Bungel-Jida (Contemporary Literature), which became the organ of the neo-sensualist movement, influenced by the European avant-garde. His first critical success was The Izu Dancer in 1925, inspired by the beauty of a 14 year old dancer. In 1926 he co-wrote the screenplay of the Teinosuke Kinugasa film, A Page of Madness. The same year he married, but refused to have children, claiming, "I could not bear the idea of throwing into this world an orphan like myself."

The subsequent novels evoke, in a modernist and fragmented style, the bohemian lifestyle of the Eastern District of Tokyo: Asakusa, renowned for its geishas, its bars, its theatres, and its prostitutes. In 1935 Kawabata undertook the revision of Snow Country, one of his most famous novels. After being elected President of the Japanese Pen Club in 1948, he assisted struggling young writers.

Kawabata is principally known for the poetry of his novels, which are nourished with fragile descriptions of colours, perfumes, flowers and trees, and characterised by an aching loneliness. Among his major works are The Sound of the Mountains, Thousand Cranes and Sadness and Beauty. His writing also represents two tendencies: one, the refined aesthetics of a Japan traditional and immemorial, the other evoking a rapidly-modernising Japan, its eyes turned towards Europe. Although his writing brings to mind the prose of 17th century Japan and 15th century Renga (linked verse), the traces of modernity splinter Kawabata's texts, rendering their tone more contemporary.

During the 1960s Kawabata led a series of seminars in American universities. In 1968 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which contributed enormously to the recognition his work has garnered in the West.

In 1970 his friend, the writer Yushio Mishima, killed himself by seppuku. In 1972, after years of ill health, Yasunari Kawabata committed suicide. He left no note.