Word: kawabata
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...YASUNARI KAWABATA...
This is the fourth novel to reach the U.S. by Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel laureate who committed suicide last April at the age of 72. American readers may find it the most rarefied so far. Besides displaying Kawabata's customary casualness about plot and characterization, it lacks the eroticism and cosmopolitan settings that helped make his Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) accessible to Westerners. Moreover, it requires at least a crude grasp of the technicalities of Go (for which a certain number of charts are provided). But in this book as in the Orient, a little...
After the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, Japan's Nobel-prizewin-ning novelist Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country) said: "If it was a case of suicide, then it was better to see no notes left behind. A silent death is an endless word." When Kawabata, at 72, took his own life last month, that observation of a decade ago became his own epitaph: he left no notes...
Endless words have a way of expressing boundless guilt. No one can say whether or not the author's death was intended to be a comment on the loneliness of Japan's elderly-a subject Kawabata had written about with exactitude and tender sympathy. Nonetheless, his suicide focused attention on an alarming fact about Japan's aged citizens: fully one-third of all suicides occur among those 60 and over. Among women over 65, the rate is 45.9 per 100,-000-the highest in the world...
Died. Yasunari Kawabata, 72, patriarch of Japanese letters; by suicide; in Zushi, Japan. Orphaned at the age of three, Kawabata explored loneliness and human sensitivity in such novels as Thousand Cranes, Snow Country and Sleeping Beauties. "The sentiments of an orphan," he once said, "run deep in all my works." Though a student of both modern Western literature and ancient Asian works, he chose to practice the classic Japanese literary style in which sentences are spare, images vague, and ideas suggested rather than baldly stated. In 1968 he became the only Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for literature...