Beauty and Sadness

Author(s): Yasunari Kawabata

Classics

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 has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.


Product Information

'One is repeatedly moved by the delicacy of the imagery and the understated precision' - New Statesman

Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned at the age of two. His first stories were published while he was still in high school and he decided to become a writer. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year later made his first impact on Japanese letters with Izu Dancer. He soon became a leading figure the lyrical school that offered the chief challenge to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s. His writings combine the two forms of the novel and the haiku poems, which within restrictions of a rigid metre achieves a startling beauty by its juxtaposition of opposite and incongruous terms. Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) brought him international recognition. Kawabata died by his own hand, on April 16 1972. Beauty and Sadness is translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (1921-2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese literature.

General Fields

  • : 9780141192611
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : 0.114
  • : January 2011
  • : 198mm X 129mm X 8mm
  • : April 2011
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Yasunari Kawabata
  • : FA
  • : 144
  • : 895.6344
  • : English
  • : 1
  • : Paperback