Word: gingko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fluorescent skeletons jiggle their pasteboard bones in each recess; the cellars resound with prerecorded mutters, wails and injunctions to silence; entrepreneurs tap their way down the corridors, prodding each moulding in the hope that a panel will fly open, revealing a lost Titian, an undocumented Goya, or a Japanese gingko-nut tycoon with an open checkbook. Collectors do not want the taxman to know how much they paid for what, and neither do dealers. The availability of a painting may be the occasion for as much conspiratorial hoo-ha and discreetly vicious elbowing as anything in the annals of industrial...
Kawabata's stylistic signature is the stringing together of minute episodes linked by association. Brilliant sunflower heads remind an old man that his own mind is fading. A girl's failure to notice new buds on a gingko tree is the first sign that she is deeply troubled. The plot moves as imperceptibly as the earth. It concerns a year in the lives of the Ogata family, particularly Shingo, the head of the household. At 62, he feels old and vaguely discontented. The light in his life comes from his new daughter-in-law Kikuko...
Life in Miniature. He is equally depressed when his daughter's marriage collapses and she comes home with her two irritating children. Shingo is obsessed with beauty, but both his wife and daughter are ugly. He is left with the gingko tree, the sunflowers and Kikuko for comfort...