Word: kawabata
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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...
...Yukio Mishima had just about run out of challenge. He had produced 20 novels, 33 plays, a travel book, more than 80 short stories, and countless essays. He was a major contender for the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature that went to his countryman. Novelist Yasunari Kawabata. He sang on the stage, produced, directed and acted in movies. Often called "Japan's Hemingway" because of his love for physical contest and the outdoor life, he lifted weights and became proficient at karate and kendo, the ancient swordfighting game once practiced by the samurai warriors. He was a perfectionist...
...first event of any consequence occurs-offstage-on page 167, and thereafter the book drifts to an uneasy solution. The pace is probably too slow for most Western readers. Yet for those who persevere, there is a reward. Though the story is seen through Shingo's eyes, Kawabata succeeds to an extraordinary degree in presenting the events as they must seem to other characters as well. The same conflicts are dramatized differently in several scenes. Voices echo and re-echo as tension and release are reflected in household rituals. In his fragile miniature of life, Kawabata has managed...