Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of suicide.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka, Japan, on June 11, 1899. Both of his parents died by the time he was four years old, and he was raised in the country by his grandparents. His grandmother died when he was seven, and his only sister died when he was nine. When his grandfather died in 1915, Kawabata moved to a middle school dormitory.

This turbulent and sad childhood likely contributed to the themes of isolation, melancholy, and loneliness in Kawabata’s literature. In “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket,” happy childhood scenes are revered as “fairy tale”-like (Paragraph 2), which suggests that idyllic childhood is not realistic or that it was not realistic for him. It is viewed with a sense of longing and both physical distance as an onlooker and distance as the narrator thinking to himself rather than conversing with other characters, illustrating an awareness of idyllic childhood but also a notion that it was out of his grasp. The juxtaposition of idealism and beauty next to sadness and isolation are consistent themes throughout his body of work.