With a restraint that barely conceals the ferocity of his characters' passions, one of Japan's great postwar novelists tells the luminous story of Kikuji and the tea party he attends with Mrs. Ota, the rival of his dead father's mistress. A tale of desire, regret, and sensual nostalgia, every gestur[...]
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hi[...]
Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is al[...]
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship w[...]
The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and h[...]
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught [...]
A new translation of the only work not currently available in English by a Nobel-Prize winning author and the best known Japanese writer outside of Japan.[...]
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country" is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets [...]
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante, meets Komako[...]
The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not-knowing. Kawabata lets[...]
Kawabata's The Old Capital mentioned in the citation accompanying his 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, is now available in a quality paperback edition of Martin Holman's well-received translation.[...]
Nobelpristagare i kortform!
Nästan alla nobelpristagare i litteratur har skrivit noveller. En novell är som alla vet en kort skönlitterär text, men vad är en nobell? I en här samlingen finns även andra former av korta texter: utdrag ur romaner eller essäistiska och anekdotiska ber[...]
Yasunari Kawabatan Lumen maa oli ilmestyessään 1958 ensimmäinen suomeksi käännetty japanilainen romaani. Romaanin herkän surumielinen sävy kiehtoo ja ihastuttaa yhä hienovireisyydellään. Lumen maa on rakkausromaani, sen keskeisenä aiheena on syrjäseudun nuoren geishan, Komakon, rakkaus S[...]
Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stones. The competition between the Master of Go and his opponent, Otake, is waged over several months and layered in ceremony. But beneath the game's decorum lie tensions that consume not only the players [...]