Which Nobel Prize in Literature laureate was the first Japanese winner?

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving it in 1968.

The Swedish Academy honored Kawabata for his narrative mastery, which expressed Japanese sensibility with great feeling. His best-known novels include Snow Country, The Sound of the Mountain, and Thousand Cranes.

Kawabata’s prose is known for restraint, suggestion, and attention to beauty, loneliness, and transience. He often drew on traditional Japanese aesthetics while writing in a modern literary form. His Nobel lecture was titled Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself.

Kenzaburō Ōe became Japan’s second Literature laureate in 1994. Haruki Murakami is frequently named in guesses about Japanese Nobel winners, but he has not received the Literature prize.