T H E LIFE AND WORKS OF

YASUNARI KAWABATA
By EDWARD

G.

EVERYONE WHO WRITES about Yasunari

Kawabata tells us, no doubt rightly, that

the crucial events in his life happened
very early: he was a child, in his own
phrase, "without home or family," and,
again as he himself has put it, he has had
the mind of a wanderer ever since. He
lost his parents in infancy, and his
grandmother and his only sister, whom
he never really knew, died not long afterward. He was fourteen when, in 1914,
his grandfather died. From the following
year he lived in a middle-school dormitory, and in 1917 he left his native Osaka
to enter the First Higher School in
Tokyo. Insofar as he has had a permanent abode since, it has been in eastern
Japan.
He has spent much of his time on the
Izu peninsula, south of Tokyo, during his
years in Tokyo University (where in
1921 he took a degree in Japanese literature). In 1929, he settled in a part of
Tokyo conveniently near the Asakusa
entertainment district, and since 1936 he
has lived in Kamakura. Though his life
has been a quiet one, rather free of external incident, he was much honored in his
own country before receiving the Nobel
Prize in 1968. He became president of
the Japan P.E.N. Center in 1948, and his
duties in that capacity more than once

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took him abroad. In 1953, he was elected

a member of the Japan Academy. He has
written very little about his native Osaka,
although in recent years Kyoto has
caught his fancy.
For some writers a sense of identity
with place is essential. For others, homelessness is the big fact, the beginning of it
all. Kawabata's writing practices suggest
a positive longing for that condition.
More than thirty years ago he remarked
upon the fact that so much of his writing
more than half of it, he saidhad
been done at inns. As it is with the
creator, so it is with the creations. Even
when they have homes, as has Mrs. Ota
of
Sembazuru
{Thousand
Cranes)
(1952), Kawabata characters are seldom
seen in them. The most notable character
of the early Kawabata is a wandering
dancer on the Izu peninsula. The most
notable recent characters are two old
men. One of them, in Nemureru Bijo
{House of the Sleeping Beauties) (19601961), is seen only at inns and apparently has mainly unpleasant memories of
home; the other, in Yama no Oto {The
Sound of the Mountain)
(1949-1954),
feels cut off from his nearest blood relatives, and dreams of two unattainable
women, his daughter-in-law and his sisterin-law, the latter dead many years, in an

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