Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata’s book Thousand Cranes translated by Edward Seidensticker reads like a fleshed out poem. This is a story of a man (Kikuji) and his relationships with his deceased father and his father’s two mistresses. It is a delicately told tale illuminating human relations, a tale that can be transferred to a global stage.

I read this as part of the Japanese Literature Challenge, and it is a great addition to my literary knowledge.

If you are fortunate enough to read Japanese, there is the original version. This novel was apparently first released in serial version.

Kikuji’s story revolves around the tea ceremony that his father so loved. The clothes that characters wear as well as their choice of words give insight into their universal characters. In Thousand Cranes, small details are of large import, as they are in a tea ceremony.

Nobel prize winning Kawabata’s style is very poetic in the sense that each word, each sentence means much more than its first-layer reading tells. This is a book to read in small doses so that you can have time to think about what you have read before moving on.

Thousand Cranes ends with unresolved issues that touch all of the characters.

Labels: fiction, japanese literature challenge, Kawabata, morality, nobel

posted by reader kay at 1:34 PM