Tamio Hōjō

At the age of 19, he was diagnosed with leprosy, entered a hospital where he would be kept in isolation for the rest of his life, and died of the disease three and a half years later.

[1] After Hōjō's death, a complete collection was relatively soon published, with Kawabata helping to compile it.

[2] For this reason, although Hōjō's active period was short, his essays, diaries, and letters have been well preserved, providing insight into his life and personality.

[3] The reason for this was that at the time leprosy was believed to be an incurable contagious disease, which led to a variety of misunderstandings and discrimination.

[2]: 4–12 [4] The only information known about his life before his hospitalization was the years of his birth, marriage, and divorce, as described in notes he himself had written for his complete collection, for a long time.

[4] While his work had been forgotten for a long time,[4] Hōjō's real name was made public in 2014, 80 years after his death.

[2]: 4–12 According to his notes he himself wrote for his complete collection, in 1932, at the age of 18, Hōjō married a distant relative, but the following year he noticed that his legs were paralyzed, and so he divorced her wife.

[2] This was renamed by Kawabata to Life's First Night (いのちの初夜, Inochi no Shoya) and published in Bungakukai in February 1936.

[2]: 72–90  The reason is unclear, but Nakae (2023) speculates that Kawabata may have been concerned that Hōjō's entry into the literary world would diminish the purity of his work.

"[4] Mitsuo Nakamura wrote that Hōjō's anguish laid not in enduring the illness but in having to believe that the patient would be resurrected.

[4] In 2014, the city of Anan in Tokushima Prefecture has for the first time made public his real name, birthplace, and where he grew up.