Born into a well-established family in Osaka, Japan, Yasunari was orphaned by the time he was four, after which he lived with his grandparents. He had an older sister who was taken in by an aunt, and whom he met only once

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In October 1924, Kawabata, Riichi Yokomitsuand other young writers started a new literary journal Bungei Jidai ("The Artistic Age"). This journal was a reaction to the entrenched old

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Kawabata started to achieve recognition for a number of his short stories shortly after he graduated, receiving acclaim for "The Dancing Girl of Izu" in 1926, a story about a melancholy student who, on a walking trip down Izu Peninsula, meets a young dancer, and returns

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As the president of Japanese P.E.N.for many years after the war (1948–1965), Kawabata was a driving force behind the translation of Japanese literature into English and other Western

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Kawabata apparently committed suicide in 1972 by gassinghimself, but a number of close associates and friends, including his widow, consider his death to have been accidental. One thesis, as

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• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo

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Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 16 October 1968, the first Japanese person to receive such a distinction. In awarding the prize "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind", the Nobel

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