Word: yasunari
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BEAUTY AND SADNESS by YASUNARI KAWABATA...
...Yasunari Kawabata's last novel is a consummately skillful arrangement of space and stillness, a brush drawing of love and vengeance not ultimately convincing, but perhaps ultimately not meant to convince. Yet the novel's measure is that its most fascinating feature may be the face of the writer bleakly regarding the reader from the dust jacket. Scraps of knowledge help: Kawabata, the author of Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968; he wrote no novel after this one; he killed himself at age 72 in 1972. The jacket photograph...
...LAKE by YASUNARI KAWABATA Translated by REIKO TSUKIMURA 160 pages. Kodansha International...
...Yasunari Kawabata is probably best known in the West for his novels Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959). Which is to say that this most Japanese of Japanese writers remains somewhat obscure to Western readers despite his 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. His fiction seems to be most valued in Japanese for those qualities that are most difficult to render in trans lation: precision and delicacy of image, the shimmer of haiku, an allusive sad ness and minute sense of the impermanence of things...
This is the fourth novel to reach the U.S. by Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel laureate who committed suicide last April at the age of 72. American readers may find it the most rarefied so far. Besides displaying Kawabata's customary casualness about plot and characterization, it lacks the eroticism and cosmopolitan settings that helped make his Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) accessible to Westerners. Moreover, it requires at least a crude grasp of the technicalities of Go (for which a certain number of charts are provided). But in this book as in the Orient, a little...