Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical prose won him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Japanese author to receive it. His novels include Beauty and Sadness, about a middle-aged man who returns to Kyoto and meets a former lover, along with The Sound of the Mountain, The Master of Go, and Thousand Cranes. Born in 1899, he died in 1972, and his books are still widely read.