Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was a distinguished Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature for exemplifying in his writings the Japanese mind. Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka on June 11, 1899, into a cultured family, his father being a...

Kawabata Yasunari was the first (and, until 1994, the only) Japanese author to achieve international status through receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, which came to him in 1968. His writings attracted a worldwide audience who saw in them expressio...

There were some 140 cross-country ski areas in New England last winter and the good news for XC skiers (who had reason to worry) is that there should be just about as many this season. However, another winter like 1991-92, which saw much of...

Norwegians watch cross-country ski races with the same zeal we Americans show for impeachment trials. They don't use the term "cross-country skiing," though. The Norwegian word is langrenn, which translates directly as, "Look at this amazing collection of frozen snot in my beard!" ...

When it appeared in 2004, we liked this exoti-luxury sedan giving the well-heeled enthusiast a decidedly Italian alternative to top-line German sedans. Think Filet all'Aceto Balsamico, beef steak sauced with vinegar di Modena (get the Tradizionale!), in lieu of Schweinhaxe, that succulent rotisserized pork from...

[Snow Country] holds the potential to shed considerable light not only on the larger purposes of Kawabata's work but on the techniques of Japanese narrative fiction in general. In this regard, Snow Country is a mirror, reflecting both backwards and forwards…. [Kawabata's Nobel Prize acceptance speech] provided a selection of certain principles especially important to him, many of them related in turn to Zen Buddhism.

It is a maximal artistry which strikes me first about Kawabata, even in translation. Artistry in fiction among other things means that a reader is never bored, also that he accepts, that he has to accept, the inevitability and instantaneous quality of the things described, the persons, the actions, the situations, being just so…. At once Kawabata establishes a situation. Sometimes in the very first sentence. Snow Country, an extraordinary study of love and sensuality which was the first of his books ...