Anecdotes

Kawabata left many of his stories apparently unfinished, sometimes to the annoyance of readers and reviewers. This was in fact done intentionally, as Kawabata felt that vignettes of incidents along the way were far more important than major conclusions.

He was a close friend of the writer Yukio Mishima. When Mishima committed suicide in 1972, his Japanese biographer Takeo Okuno stated he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row.

Kawabata apparently committed suicide in 1972 by gassing himself, but a number of close associates, including his widow, consider his death to have been accidental; one thesis, advanced by Donald Richie, was that he mistakenly unplugged the gas tap while preparing a bath.

Along with the death of all his family while he was young, Kawabata suggested that the War was one of the greatest influences on his work, stating he would be able to write only elegies in postwar Japan.

He was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1968.

His writing style was influenced by the Japanese haiku poems: brief and sparse, but lyrical and filled with nuances.

He considers his novel "The Master of Go" (1951) to be his finest work.

Kawabata was the president of the Japanese P.E.N. (a worldwide association of writers, founded to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere) from 1948 to 1965; in this position, Kawabata was a driving force behind the translation of Japanese literature into English and other Western languages. For his efforts, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 1960, and awarded Japan's Order of Culture the following year.