川端康成

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 anxieties and desires of an old man, Shingo, who lives with his family in a suburb of Tokyo, are shown. He hears "the sound of the mountain", the faint rumble in the hills that is a muffled hint of unknown occurrences and a foreboding of death. The affection he feels for his daughter-in-law, the increasing tensions of his relations with his wife, son and daughter are also muffled, yet disturbingly powerful.

Kawabata delivered the lecture for his 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature on December 12, titling it "Japan, the Beautiful and Myself." He begins by quoting two classical Japanese poems close to his heart, which he writes when asked for samples of his calligraphy, the first written by the Zen priest Dogen and the second by the priest Myoe. By elaborating on these and several other related poems, Kawabata presents his idea of the gentle and quiet yet warm and passionate quality of the Japanese spirit, one which considers nature a close companion and at times identical with the human self. Moving nimbly through the various traditional Japanese arts, covering flower-arranging, tea ceremony, ceramics, landscaping, and literature, he paints the Japanese idea of beauty in comprehensive and evocative colors, speaking about such things as mono no aware, the poignant awareness of the beauty of things and their passing; the use of plain words in poetry to evoke the wordless; and, very importantly to his own work, the embrace of a nothingness which is quite unlike its Western counterpart in that it has much more to do with becoming one with the world instead of pessimism.

This novel tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige. Since her youth, Chieko has been told that she was kidnapped as a baby by the couple in a moment of profound desire. When she is twenty, however, she learns that she was actually a foundling, abandoned by her real parents. Still, the love and affection Takichiro and Shige have given her satisfy her heart and she has no desire to seek out her biological parents--until she makes a startling discovery before the altar of Yasaka shrine. This work was specifically cited by the Nobel committee as one of the three novels for which the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

Snow Country (雪国, Yukiguni) is a novel by the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. The novel is considered a classic work of Japanese literature and was among the three novels the Nobel Committee cited in 1968, when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"In the three surreal, erotically charged tales in this collection, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. These stories are piercing evocations of sexuality and human psychology-- and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty--that showcase one of the twentieth century's great writers at his very best."--Back cover.

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 gesture has a meaning, and even the most fleeting touch or casual utterance has the power to illuminate entire lives--sometimes in the same moment that it destroys them. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. "A novel of exquisite artistry...rich suggestibility...and a story that is human, vivid and moving."--New York Herald Tribune "Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible. This is a tragedy in soft focus, but its passions are fierce."--Commonweal