Kawabata Yasunari

Kawabata Yasunari

(born June 11, 1899, Osaka, Japan—died April 16, 1972, Zushi) Japanese novelist. His writing echoes ancient Japanese forms in prose influenced by post-World War I French literary currents such as Dadaism (see Dada) and Expressionism. His best-known novel is Snow Country (1948), the story of a forlorn geisha. His other major works (published together in 1952) are A Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain. The loneliness and preoccupation with death in many of his mature works may derive from his losing all his near relatives while he was young. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. He committed suicide shortly after his friend Mishima Yukio.