Translator's note
Kawabata’s fifty-ninth birthday was only a month away when First Snow
on Fuji was published in April 1958. He’d already written most of the
novels that would come to be known as his late masterpieces, and though
he wasn’t yet as widely celebrated in the West as he was in Japan, it must
have been clear that his reputation as an international writer would only
continue to grow as translations of the quietly stunning later works
appeared. It must also have been clear that as his fame spread, and as he
aged, Kawabata would be forced to slow down, to write less. His time
would be less and less his own.
And indeed tie foreseeable occurred. Kawabata was hospitalized for
more than six months after suffering a severe gallstone attack in November
1958. He spent much of 1959 and 1960 traveling through Europe,
accepting awards and attending conferences. And in 1960—for the first
time in al his years as a writer—he published nothing. He was hospitalized
for a second time in 1962 when efforts to end an eight-year-long addiction
to sleeping pills landed him in a coma. Ten days passed before he woke.
But then he was out in the world again, striving to make Japanese literature
international, doing everything he could to help other writers. He himself
had extremely little time to write. As Kawabata the writer became
increasingly visible, Kawabata the man who wrote did indeed vanish into a
certain kind of silence.
If this trend was clear to anyone in 1958, it must have been obvious to
Kawabata. He’d been the busy president of Japan’s RE.N. Club for a
decade. He’d spent two years organizing P.E.N.’s twenty-ninth international
conference, which was held in Tokyo in 1957. He could already see what
was coming. Kawabata wrote a brief essay on the final day of the 1957
conference he’d worked so terribly hard to prepare. “The ‘I’ in me seems to
