Yasunari Kawabata was named the Nobel laureate in literature on October 17, 1968, the first Japanese writer to receive the prize. The committee cited his narrative mastery and his ability to express the essence of the Japanese mind with great sensibility, and it named in particular three novels, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes and The Sound of the Mountain. The award was a first for Japan, and it was read there as a recognition of the whole modern literature of the country.
Kawabata's work is hard to place in a sentence. His novels are quiet. Their plots are thin. The power is in the detail, the feel of snow, the light in a room, the small gestures between people, and the sense, running under all of it, of loss and of beauty that cannot be kept. Snow Country, which he wrote and rewrote over years, is the one most often named, the story of a man from the city and a geisha in a mountain hot spring town, and it ends with a fire and a falling body and a sky of stars.
He was of a generation. After the war, Japanese literature had a vigour and a world readership it had not had before, with the translations coming out one after another, and Kawabata stood at the centre of it, a writer's writer, precise and spare, and also the head of the PEN club in Japan and a figure in the country's cultural life. His acceptance speech, which he called Japan, the Beautiful and Myself, is the clearest statement of what he thought the tradition owed him and he owed it.
He took his own life in 1972, four years after the prize, gassing himself in his study, and he left no note. The death was read as an act in keeping with a body of work that had always held beauty and death close together. The prize, and the suicide, made him the figure through which the outside world understood Japanese letters for a generation.