It’s the birthday of novelist Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). (The other two Japanese authors to win the Nobel in lit are Kenzaburō Ōe, 1994, and Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017, although maybe he shouldn’t count since he was born in Japan but raised in the UK, where he became a British citizen in 1983 at the age of 29.) Kawabata’s lyrical writing sometimes drew on the tradition of 15th century Japanese verse.

Kawabata was born in Osaka and orphaned at just four years old. He was taken in by grandparents, but by his mid-teens they were also gone, as well as his only sister, who died when Kawabata was 11. He lived for a time with other relatives, but these losses from his childhood are echoed in his later writing. Kawabata studied at Tokyo Imperial University and was soon associated with the Neosensualist school of writing, for which he co-founded the literary journal Bungei jidai, meaning The Artistic Age. In this journal he published The Izu Dancer (1926). Kawabata’s most highly regarded novels are Snow Country (1948), Thousand Cranes (1949, but never completed), and The Sound of the Mountain (1949-1954).

Two years after Kawabata was awarded the Nobel, he was shaken by the suicide of his friend and protégé, novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970); Mishima had killed himself via the old samurai tradition of self-disembowlment followed by decapitation with the help of a BFF. (For more on Mishima, see my Almanac Project for January 14, 2019. Here’s a link.) Two years after Mishima’s death, Kawabata himself was found at the age of 72 with a gas hose in his mouth. He was survived by his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren.

In Kawabata’s Nobel lecture, while discussing the work and suicide of short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Kawabata addressed suicide and quoted from his own essay, “Eyes in their Last Extremity”: “How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.” Kawabata then added, “I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.”

Have a quietly lyrical June Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.