In January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near the junior high school (comparable to a modern high school) to which he had formerly commuted by train. Having lost all his immediate family, he moved in with his his mother’s relatives of his mother. He later described himself as a “child without a home.” An older sister who had been taken in by an aunt, and whom he had met only once after the death of their parents, died when he was ten, and his grandfather died in 1914, when he was fifteen. When he was seven years old and entered elementary school, his grandmother died. After his father’s death, his mother moved with Kawabata to her parent’s home, where she also died the following year. His father, Kawabata Eikichi, a prominent physician, died of tuberculosis when Kawabata was just two years old. Kawabata was born June 14, 1899, in Osaka, Japan, into a prosperous and cultured family. His best-known novel, Yukiguni (1948 Snow Country), is the story of a middle-aged esthete, Shimamura, and a forlorn country geisha, Komako, set in an isolated hot spring resort west of the central mountain range, where the winters are long, dark and silent. During his life, Kawabata wrote more than one hundred “palm of the hand” stories, usually two or three pages long, which he said expressed the essence of his art.

The formlessness which characterizes much of his writing reflects the fluid composition of renga, Japanese linked verse of the fifteenth century.

Kawabata combined ancient Japanese literary tradition with modern language in his lyrical works.

Snow country japanese novel