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context: literature > modern
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Kawabata Yasunari 1899-1972
The key member of the so-called neo-impressionist school (this is nothing to do with painters: it's a bad translation of 'new impressions'). He was nihilistic and an early adopter of Joyce's stream of consciousness technique. He was Japan's first Nobel winner, bizarrely for "narrative mastery" - he left many stories unfinished because he disliked conclusions, their sentimentality or morality. He killed himself, probably, two years after his close friend Mishima did, after hundreds of nightmares about him.