Yasunari Kawabata

"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments,...

This book presents English translations of two short novels by the 1968 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Snow Mountain is a nuanced love story involving a discouraged urbanite (Shimamura) and a rural geisha (Komako). Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules...

With the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata tells a story of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan, the snowiest region on earth. It is there, at an isolated mountain hotspring, that the wealthy sophisticate Shimamura meets the geisha Komako, who gives herself to him without regrets, knowing that their passion cannot last. Shimamura is a dilettante...

"With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters--born to the same father but different mothers--struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. Momoko, their father's first child--haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final,...

"Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, Go is an essential expression of the Japanese spirit. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and heretofore invincible Master and a younger, more modern challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan...

This novel tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige. Since her youth, Chieko has been told that she was kidnapped as a baby by the couple in a moment of profound desire. When she is twenty, however, she learns that she was actually a foundling, abandoned by her real parents. Still, the love and affection Takichiro and Shige have given her satisfy her heart and she has no desire to seek...