Yasunari Kawabata
(1899–1972)
Yasunari Kawabata was born into a privileged family in Osaka, Japan. However, his early childhood included much grief and sadness. Both his parents died when he was three years old, and Kawabata went to live with his grandmother, but she died when he was seven. Then, when he was nine, Kawabata’s only sister died. Critics believe that these losses led to the deep sadness and preoccupation with death that are common in much of Kawabata’s writing.
Kawabata studied literature at Tokyo Imperial University. After college, he helped found a journal for contemporary literature. In his early writing, Kawabata used surrealist techniques in contrast to the Japanese norm of the time—realism. His work contained vivid descriptions of nature, dreams, and recollections, as well as combining traditional Japanese aesthetics with impressionism.
After several of Kawabata’s friends committed suicide, Kawabata wrote an essay condemning the practice, and he spoke out against suicide in his Nobel Prize Lecture. However, in April 1972, following the suicide of yet another friend, Kawabata took his own life.
R. K. Narayan
(1906– )
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan is often considered India’s greatest English-language writer. Narayan’s novel The Guide (1958) won India’s highest literary award, and in 1964 Prime Minister Nehru awarded him the Padma Bhushan for distinguished service.
Born in Madras, India, Narayan was one of nine children in a middle-class family of Brahmans, the highest caste in the Hindu social order. Although his native language is Tamil, Narayan learned English at an early age. He writes in English, purposely adding an Indian flavor.
Narayan’s father, a headmaster in the government’s education service, subscribed to British and American news and literary magazines, and as a boy Narayan happily immersed himself in these and in classics of world literature. He attended Maharajah College and took a teaching position after graduation, but he soon left teaching to devote himself to writing. Sympathizing with his desire to become a writer, his grandmother chose a day that was astrologically auspicious, and on that day Narayan bought a notebook to begin his first novel. He invented a small Indian town called Malgudi and a boy called Swami, and he faithfully wrote several pages each day. Each night he read through his manuscript and revised carefully. When Narayan was twenty-eight, a friend in England showed Narayan’s manuscript to British novelist Graham Greene, who took it to his publisher. In 1935, Swami and Friends was published in London. The novel sold poorly at first, but reviews were favorable. Narayan’s career was launched.
Narayan’s works include many other novels, essays, an autobiography (My Days, 1974), and prose adaptations of India’s ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He has also written more than two hundred short stories.
Bei Dao
(1949– )
Bei Dao is a pseudonym for Zhao Zhenkai. Dao was born in Beijing in 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded. His parents came from a traditional middle class family in Shanghai. His background gave Dao the opportunity to attend the best schools in Beijing. However, the Cultural Revolution began when Bei Dao was seventeen, and he was very happy to stop attending school. Dao joined the Red Guard where he was active in raids against the cultural elite. He helped break into people’s houses and libraries to remove banned books. Interestingly, he later dedicated his life to writing poetry, magazines, and books that were banned in China.
As a Red Guard, Bei Dao was sent to the countryside to work in construction. He was surprised that life in the country was so different from what was described in propaganda. He and other workers who were disillusioned with the situation began to meet secretly to read, study, and write. When the Cultural Revolution ended and the country began to open up to new ideas, Bei Dao and his friends started an underground literary magazine, which became very popular. However, within two years the government shut the magazine down, believing that the poetry, called "misty poetry," had political undertones.
Bei Dao was in Berlin in 1989 when the crackdown on democracy occurred in Tiananmen Square. Because Dao had signed petitions before the protests and his poetry was written on protest banners, Dao knew it would be unsafe for him to return to China.
As an exile, Bei Dao began publishing his magazine again in 1990, and he continues to write poetry, stories, and essays. He has also taught in many countries including Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the United States. His literary awards include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an honorary membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has even been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature several times.
Ha Jin
(1956– )
Chinese American writer Ha Jin was born Xuefei Jin in the Liaoning Province of China. Much of his childhood was spent away from his parents. Because his parents worked in different towns, he was placed in the care of another couple; later, he was sent away to school.
After China’s Cultural Revolution began, Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen. He served in the army for five and a half years. During this time, he studied on his own and yearned to go to college. However, because of the government’s policies during the Cultural Revolution, colleges were closed. After he left the army, Jin learned English from a radio program.
In 1977, colleges in China reopened, and Jin attended Heilongjiang University, where he was assigned to study English. After earning a master’s degree in American literature from Shandong University, he traveled to the United States, where he received a Ph.D. from Brandeis and began publishing poetry in English.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Jin decided to stay in the United States. He changed his name to Ha Jin, which was easier for most Americans to pronounce, and found a job teaching at Emory University. Jin published another book of poetry, Facing Shadows, in 1996, and two collections of short stories: the award-winning Ocean of Words (1996), and Under the Red Flag (1997), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Jin published two novels: In the Pond (1998) and Waiting (1999). Recently, Jin moved to Boston to teach at Boston University, and he has published another collection of short stories, The Bridegroom (2000), and a novel The Crazed (2002).
