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Yasunari Kawabata Letters

Decent Essays

Likewise, Yasunari Kawabata’s collection of letters reveal the reasoning behind why he writes so cynically about love. The letters narrate the story of Kawabata’s first love, a tragic tale of the relationship between him and a young girl named Hatsuyo Ito. She was thirteen and he was already twenty; regardless, they met at a literary café and grew close, falling in love (). They were both orphaned when they were young, and they yearned to create a family together. They planned to get married to each other, corresponding buoyantly about their future through letters. However, she refused to ever see him again and rejected him a month after they got engaged, saying she had an emergency she could not explain (Fujii 3). Kawabata later uncovered

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