Quietly Burning Japanese Snow

Kawabata Yasunari's father Kawabata Eiji is a doctor and graduated from Tokyo Medical College. He had a wide range of interests and once studied Chinese poetry and painting with a Confucian scholar in Osaka. His collection of books is quite rich in Chinese classics, as well as a large number of Japanese and Western literary works. When Kawabata Yasunari was less than two years old, he died of tuberculosis. While lying on the hospital bed, he was still thinking about his children, hoping that they would be able to make a difference when they grew up. He also struggled to sit up and wrote the words "protect oneself" and "chastity" for his son Kawabata Yasunari and his daughter Yoshiko respectively as a legacy. Perhaps because he was too young, Kawabata Yasunari seemed not to feel sad when he said his final farewell to his father. This was the first death farewell that Kawabata Yasunari experienced after his birth. It is precisely because of such a childhood that he grew from a homeless orphan to an independent young writer.