Kawabata, Yasunari

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer born in Osaka. He came from an educated, wealthy family, but he lost his parents at an early age and his only sibling, a sister, died when he was nine years old. These childhood traumas came to inform his writing. After growing up with his maternal grandfather in the countryside, Kawabata read English and Japanese literature at Tokyo University between 1920 and 1924. He then became an author and a journalist of central importance in Japanese cultural life. He was elected to the Japanese Academy of the Arts in 1953, he was a long-standing chairman of Japanese PEN (1948–1965) and he often represented the organisation at international conferences. He went into politics in the 1960s, running campaigns for conservative politicians and making statements together with his friend and fellow author Yukio Mishima. Like Mishima, Kawabata ended his life by committing suicide.