Yasunari Kawabata

Orphaned of both parents by age three and then of the grandfather who raised him at fifteen, Kawabata grew up so surrounded by death that classmates called him a 'master of funerals.' He studied at Tokyo Imperial University and joined the Shinkankakuha, a group of young writers chasing new sensory techniques for Japanese prose.

Snow Country, revised and expanded over more than a decade, distilled a doomed love affair at a hot-spring inn into prose as spare as haiku; The Sound of the Mountain later did the same for an old man's misplaced tenderness toward his daughter-in-law. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He had mentored and championed the young Yukio Mishima for two decades; Mishima's ritual suicide in 1970 devastated him. Kawabata died by gas asphyxiation in 1972, leaving no note.