Yasunari Kawabata

A luminous story of desire, regret, and the almost sensual nostalgia that binds the living to the dead.

"In the three surreal, erotically charged tales in this collection, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. These stories are piercing evocations of sexuality and human psychology-- and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty--that showcase one of the twentieth century's great writers at his very best."--Back cover.

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. While Momoko, their father's first child--haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final,...

"Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions--exploring love and madness--is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in April, 1972. The book concerns Ineko's mother and Kuno, the young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Mental Hospital, which she has entered for treatment of a condition that might be called "seizures of body blindness." Although her vision as a whole is...