Death of Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata died on 16 April 1972 in Zushi, aged 72. A Japanese novelist and short-story writer born in Osaka, Kawabata was orphaned in childhood and grew up with his grandfather. He came to prominence in the 1920s with The Izu Dancer and became a leading figure of modernist literature. His works, including Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain and The Old Capital, are marked by a delicate, lyrical style, themes of beauty, loneliness and transience, and the influence of classical Japanese aesthetics. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a mentor of the younger writer Yukio Mishima. He died in 1972, a death generally ruled a suicide.

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