Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, treasured memories from his middle-school days of “this sage-like poet”:
His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were long like two beards, and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.