Kawabata Yasunari (1968, Literature)

Kawabata's Snow Country, with its masterly depiction of the beauty and fleeting joys and sorrows of life, has become a modern Japanese classic. Other masterpieces by Kawabata include Dancing Girl of Izu, The Old Capital, Thousand Cranes,and The sound of the Mountain.

日本 その姿と心 p.369
学生社

Modern fiction

The link between people and place has grown painfully fragile in the fiction of Nobel laureate, Kawabata Yasunari. In novels such as Yukiguni (1935-1948; tr Snow Country, 1956), Kawabata creates enormous distances between his characters, suggesting a dread of intimacy that threatens even the most promising of human relationships. After the war, Kawabata took to writing what he called "elegies to the lost Japan" in such works as Yama no oto (1949-1954; tr The Sound of the Mountain, 1970), in which the aging protagonist, Shingo, unable to endure the frustrating losses that surround him, opens a gulf between himself and his family by retreating into his memories of the irretrievable past.

バイリンガル日本事典 p.274~275
講談社インターネット株式会社