The Suicide of a Nobel

By Moschos Emmanouel Lagouvardos

(Transl. F. Karatzou)

It’s difficult for us to understand how someone can fall into such great despair and how someone can reach the point of committing suicide, especially when this has to do with a person like Giasounar Kavabata, who, apart from being a great writer and a spiritually cultivated person, was also a social fighter with considerable social activity.

Giasounari Kavabata was born in Osaka, Japan in 1899 to a wealthy family. He studied art, something which influenced the formation of his character and his development as a writer and he was nominated doctor of English literature at the university of Tokyo. He established and directed the literary periodical of “Contemporary literature”. With Yiouko Misama and other writers, they signed a public protest with which they condemned the cultural civilizing revolution in China. As the president of a Japanese written association encouraged young inspired writers.

It opposed suicide, which in Japan is considered a tradition, known as harduri. In his speech at the Swedish Academy, in a country where the number of suicides is also high, with the opportunity of his being awarded the Nobel Prize, he condemned suicide bringing to mind his friends and fellow writers who died in this way.

Kavabata surely suffered for a long period of time from bad health and on the 16^th of April, 1972, two years after the public suicide of Misama, he committed suicide with gas. He left no note. In the last paragraph of his elegy (The dancer of 12ou, Erato Publications) he writes about death and the immortality of the soul. “However, I more than accepting the specimens of love from the spiritual world and surviving in hell or the future world prefer to become, together with you, a scarlet flower of a plum tree, a flower of an oleander while the butterflies which gather the pollen will unite us”.

In our own culture we don’t embellish death. We Greeks don’t deny seeing the tragic side of death. Lines like that of Agelos Sikelianos: ‘Irreproachably, Agivano, the student of Buddha, took a knife’ would never be written for a Greek.

The spiritual atmosphere of the East if wary to bear intense. They don’t accept resurrection.In its despair, the soul migrates to another kind of being, to animals, birds even to flowers and plants.

Kavabata became acquainted with death at a very early age. At the age of three, he lost his parents. At the age of seven, his grandmother died and at the age of nine his only sister. All these deaths brought about mental wounds, which, according to the opinion of some critics, molded the underlying basis for the feeling of loss which is dominant in all of his works. His first, great autobiographic novel “The dancer of Izou” with which he became famous, ends in parting.

As a writer, Giasounari Kavabata was a great craftsman. He combined the purity of the pertio style Haiky’s with the living elements of Western Literature. It’s worth reading his work and admiring the enchantment of his way of speaking in which the feeling and atmosphere of intense spirituality prevails.