Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read. Born in Osaka, Japan, into a well-established doctor's family, Yasunari was orphaned when 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 thereafter, at the age of ten . Kawabata's grandmother died when he was seven , and... his grandfather when he was fifteen . Having lost all close relatives, he moved in with his mother's family . However, in January 1916, he moved into a boarding house near the junior high school to which he had formerly commuted by train. Through many of Kawabata’s works the sense of distance in his life is represented.
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