Yasunari Kawabata
Novelist
Remembered for his novels The Old Capital, Thousand Cranes, and Snow Country, this acclaimed writer was the first Japanese citizen to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. A journalist as well as a fiction writer, he was employed by the Tokyo-based Mainichi Shimbun newspaper.
While studying at Tokyo University, he founded a literary journal called Shin-Shichō and published his debut short story, "Shokonsai Ikkei."
The music composer Purusha incorporated passages from Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories into an electronic track titled "Water Flea."
Sadly, his parents had both died by the time he was four, and his grandmother and grandfather died when he was seven and fifteen, respectively. He later married a woman named Hideko.
One factor in Kawabata's 1972 apparent suicide may have been the 1970 suicide of his close friend and fellow author, Yukio Mishima.