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, [...]
It’s the birthday of one of Japan’s most important authors, Kenzaburo Oe (b. 1935), who won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for his short story “The Catch” (1957) and who won the Nobel in 1994. His work reflects the disillusionment and ambiguities of his post-WWII generation as well as the difficulties of his own life, including [...]
It’s the birthday of Yukio Mishima (b. 1925-1970), who is possibly the most important Japanese novelist of his century and who died in a far more dramatic way than any of us can hope to achieve. Seriously. Don’t even try. Mishima was born Hiraoka Kimitake in Tokyo to a government official and his wife, but [...]