Word: yasunari
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...YASUNARI KAWABATA...
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...
...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...
...Stockholm who award the prize have a way of bypassing big and/or distinguished names in favor of astounding alternatives. But not since Icelander Halldór Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata...