Yasunari Kawabata

Kawabata Yasunari (Japanese: Kawabata Yasunari/Kawabata Easy, Romanized: Kawabata Yasunari, June 14, 1899 - April 16, 1972), a world-renowned Japanese neo-sensationalist writer and literary critic, active from the Taisho to Showa years. Kawabata Yasunari was recommended for the Nobel Prize in Literature eight times in the 1960s. In 1968, he became the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner and the second Asian writer to win the prize after Rabindranath Tagore. Kawabata Yasunari was born in Osaka Prefecture and graduated from the Japanese Literature Department of Tokyo Imperial University. In college, he was appreciated by Hiroshi Kikuchi and emerged in the fields of literary criticism. Later, he co-founded the doujinshi "Literary Times" with Yokomitsu Riichi and others. He combined Western European avant-garde literature to create works known as New Sensation Literature, and attracted attention as a "New Sensationist" writer. His works are of various types, with different techniques and styles, including poetry, lyrical articles, mystical works, girls' novels, etc., so he is also called a magician. Since then, he has created works that express the "beauty of Japan" in death and reincarnation, fusion of renga and avant-garde works, etc. These works show his concern for themes such as traditional beauty and the devilish world. He has a very thorough understanding of the ugliness and ruthlessness of human nature, as well as the loneliness and despair of people. He left many masterpieces in the history of Japanese literature, which established his unshakable position as the highest peak of Japanese literature. As the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, he introduced the Japanese view of life and death and aesthetic consciousness to the world in his acceptance speech.