Yasunari Kawabata

Follows the story of a tragic affair between a wealthy dilettante and a mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, in a tale of wasted love by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Snow Country

Beauty and sadness

The Sound of the Mountain

When Kikuji is invited to attend a tea ceremony, he is unaware that Chikako has arranged for him to view a prospective bride.

Thousand Cranes

J. Martin Holman

Lane Dunlop

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata felt the essence of his art was to be found not in his longer works but in a series of short-stories which he called Palm-of-the-hand-stories - written over the span of his career. In them we find loneliness, love and the passage of time, demonstrating the range and complexity of a true master.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

A key work by the late Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author follows the story of Check, an adopted daughter of a kimono designer, who in postwar Kyoto becomes increasingly troubled by her discovery of the truth about her past life. Reprint.

The Old Capital

Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions--exploring love and madness--is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in April, 1972. The book concerns Ineko's mother and Kuno, the young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Mental Hospital, which she has entered for treatment of a condition that might be called "seizures of body blindness." Although her vision as a whole is unaffected, she periodically becomes unable to see her lover Kuno's body: when this occurs, Ineko breaks down. Whether or not her condition actually constitutes madness is a topic of heated discussion between Kuno and Ineko's mother... In this tantalizing book, Kawabata explores the incommunicability of desire as well as desire's relation to the urge to hide. With Dandelions, Kawabata carries the art of the novel, where he always suggested more than he stated, into mysterious new realms.

Dandelions

Records the struggles of the Master as he attempts to defend his title and ideals while playing a young challenger in the Japanese game of go

The Master of Go

And Other Stories

House of the Sleeping Beauties

One of the most influential figures in modern Japanese fiction, Yasunari Kawabata is treasured for the intensity of his perception and the compressed elegance of his style. This new collection includes twenty-two stories now appearing in English for the first time in book form. Written between 1923 and 1929, these short fictions form a shadow biography of the author's early years, and provide fresh glimpses of Kawabata's haunting and haunted vision. Born in 1899, Kawabata committed suicide at age seventy-two. Throughout his life he was concerned with themes of loss, longing, and memory. His childhood was repeatedly shaken by deaths in the family - first his parents when he was three, then a grandmother, an older sister, and finally the blind grandfather he cared for in his early adolescence. These personal losses linger as motifs in such remarkable stories as "Gathering Ashes" and "The Master of Funerals." The stark physical details of caregiving - suffused with edgy resentment and desperate fear - are remembered in "Diary of My Sixteenth Year." In addition to the twenty-two stories unknown to American readers, this collection features the first translation of the complete text of the classic "Dancing Girl of Izu." This unforgettable story portrays the tender anxiety of a young man whose brooding fascination with a pubescent girl nudges him along the path toward adulthood.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

رواية

الجميلات النائمات

Available in English for the very first time, a powerful, poignant novel about three half sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Snow Country."

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father’s first child—haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together—seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan’s greatest writers.

The Rainbow

A collection of stories explores characters broken by war, loss, and longing

First Snow on Fuji

This story of a stalker is a unique work by the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature.

The Lake

'La Casa de las Bellas Durmientes' es una posada que se encuentra en las afueras de Tokio, donde acuden ancianos de la buena sociedad nipona para disfrutar del placer de hermosas jóvenes. las tres narraciones que integran este volumen son un magistral y profundo análisis sobre el erotismo y la sociedad.

La casa de las bellas durmientes

From Japan's first Nobel laureate for literature, three superb stories explore the interplay between erotic fantasy and reality in a loner's mind. Kawabata's fiction is noted for combining a traditional Japanese aesthetic with modernist, often surreal trends: his richly lyrical prose is imbued with a sense of loneliness and alienation. In these three tales, underlying the erotic fantasy is the protagonists' lack of connection with other people, and their memories of past loves in an empty sterile life. The title story, "House of the Sleeping Beauties," is about a man who visits a brothel where elderly men can spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl's beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age. In "One Arm," a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night, a surreal seduction follows as he speaks to it, tries to allay its fears, caresses it and even replaces his own right arm with it. "Of Birds and Beasts" is about a man who lives alone, with a housemaid, preferring the company of the birds and dogs he keeps to human beings. But rather than living animals, these are beautiful objects which, although they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty, in much the same way as he treated his previous lover, a dancer. Beautiful yet chilling, poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

Bellezza e tristezza

A retelling of the early Heian-period prose work about a supernatural beingound by a bamboo cutter and brought up as his daughter. He urges his "aughter" to marry but she sets fantastic quests to her suiters. All fail.ventually she reveals she is from the Palace of the Moon and departs.

Yasunari Kawabata

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