Book description
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead
father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor,
Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to
meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into
a relationship with Mrs. Ota - a relationship that will bring only
suffering and destruction to all of them.
Thousand Cranes
reflects the tea ceremony's poetic precision with understated, lyrical
style and beautiful prose.
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.
Thousand Cranes is translated from the Japanese by Edward G.
Seidensticker (1921-2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese literature.
