Synopses & Reviews
Three short stories center on a lonely protagonist and his peculiar eroticism. An enticing exploration of the interplay of fantasy and reality at work on a mind in solitude.
Review
"An esoteric masterpiece." Yukio Mishima
Review
"Revealing an astonishing honesty of vision." Saturday Review
Review
"A poetic meditation on the twin themes of sexuality and death." Financial Times
Review
"One of the finest works of Kawabata's late career." William E. Sibley
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"Extraordinarily gripping." Irish Press
About the Author
Yasunari Kawabata was born in 1899. He described himself as a child "without home or family" and became, in the novelist Mishima's words, "a perpetual traveler." He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. In 1917 he left his native Osaka to enter a school in Tokyo, and in 1927 three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University he published a short novel, The Izu Dancer. Probably his best-known work, Snow Country, was completed in 1947 and has come to typify the sense of loneliness and chilly lyricism associated with the world of Kawabata. In his most fertile decade following the end of World War Il he produced The Lake, first serialized in 1954, along with two major novels The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain. House of the Sleeping Beauties was published in the early sixties, and Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968. He died in 1972.