Japan’s Quietly Burning Snow

Kawabata Yasunari’s father, Kawabata Eikichi, was a doctor who graduated from Tokyo Medical College. He had wide-ranging interests and once studied Chinese poetry and painting with a Confucian scholar in Osaka. His library held a substantial collection of classical Chinese texts, along with many Japanese and Western literary works. When Kawabata Yasunari was not yet two years old, his father died of tuberculosis. Even as he lay in bed, he thought of his children and hoped they would make something of themselves when they grew up. Struggling to sit up, he wrote the words “self-preservation” and “chastity” for his son, Kawabata Yasunari, and his daughter, Yoshiko, respectively, as his final words of guidance. Perhaps because he was so young, Kawabata Yasunari did not seem to feel sad when he said his final farewell to his father. This was the first death he experienced after coming into the world. It was this kind of childhood that shaped his journey from a homeless orphan into an independent young writer.