Only if one admires beauty from a distance can it remain unspoiled, and both one's appreciation of that remote beauty and one's resignation in recognizing that it can never be intimately embraced can preserve such unspoiled beauty. The intricate, sometimes enigmatic aesthetic values in Kawabata's writings are intriguing, but they, like his characters, are not easily approached and apprehended.
As one of two Kawabata children (Yoshiko, a sister, was four years older than he), Kawabata Yasunari was born in Osaka. His family, while not particularly well-to-do by the time of his birth, could trace its heritage to the third military regent of Japan in the early thirteenth century, and this gave the family some status in the village. His ancestors had erected a temple of the Obaku Zen sect of Buddhism in town, and Yasunari's father had obtained a medical license and become assistant director of a clinic in Osaka. His father had also studied Confucian philosophy, Chinese poetry, and painting in addition to pursuing his medical interests, but he was a man of feeble constitution, and his children inherited his respiratory problems.
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