Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned at
the age of two. His first stories were published while he was still
in high school and he decided to become a writer. He graduated from
Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year later made his first
impact on Japanese letters with Izu Dancer. He soon became a
leading figure the lyrical school that offered the chief challenge
to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s. His writings
combine the two forms of the novel and the haiku poems, which
within restrictions of a rigid metre achieves a startling beauty by
its juxtaposition of opposite and incongruous terms. Snow Country
(1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) brought him international
recognition. Kawabata died by his own hand, on April 16 1972.
Snow Country is translated from the Japanese by Edward G.
Seidensticker (1921-2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese
literature.
Beautifully economical . . . The haiku works entirely by
implication; so, in this novel, using the same delicate, glancing
technique, Mr. Kawabata probes a complicated human relationship
*The Times Literary Supplement*
Kawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works
of our time
*The New York Times Book Review*
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