Snow Country. Ancient Capital

Author: (Japanese) Kawabata Yasunari
Translator: Ye Weiqiu Tang Yuemei
Japan/Japan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features: The Snow Country, Koto, and The Thousand Cranes are masterpieces of Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 for these three novels, making him the second Eastern writer after Tagore to receive this honor. Kawabata's novels showcase the inner beauty of traditional Japanese culture, deliberately pursuing a "Japanese beauty of the ruins of a defeated homeland under the fading light of sunset." His novels blend gravity and desolation, richness and decay, in an elusive manner, creating exquisite and misty poetic charm. They are imbued with a subtle Eastern fate, containing the vanity of life, the end of beauty, and the senseless sorrow of life, which gives Kawabata's works a illusory and intangible artistic beauty. This book collects these three masterpieces. The Snow Country presents a world of sorrow and elegance through the emotional entanglements between a wealthy and leisurely dance researcher, Shimamura, and an actress and a pure-hearted girl. Koto tells a touching story of the joys and sorrows between a pair of twin sisters raised in drastically different socioeconomic backgrounds. The Thousand Cranes depicts the tragic consequences when a wealthy young man, Kikuji, unintentionally engages in a physical relationship with his father's former lover, Madam Tamada, which ultimately leads to the suicide of the girl he truly loves—Mizuko, Madam Tamada's daughter.