Underappreciated: Yasunari Kawabata

For this week’s installment of Underappreciated, Martin Holman, literary translator, professor, and puppeteer, discusses the work of Yasunari Kawabata. After a tragic childhood, during which Kawabata lost nearly every one of his close family members, he achieved recognition from a number of his short stories shortly after he graduated from university. Kawabata received particular acclaim for The Dancing Girl of Izu in 1926. He went on to publish several successful novels, and in 1968: Kawabata became the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he has fallen out of the English-reading public's attention since then.