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 | 4 comment(s)

Death by Pad Thai

Congratulations to Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals (2006), a compilation of essays on memorable meals edited by Douglas Bauer, was a fun light read. There are twenty stories that are brought together by the common themes of food, and great life moments. The stories are not really about the food as much as they are about the life happenings that mixed with the memories of foods or meals.

In one of the essays, Michelle Huneven’s The Handsome Tutor at Lunch, where the parents meet their daughter’s serious boyfriend for the first time, food is central, but at the same time it is the character’s reactions to the food that takes center stage. The parents make a judgment call (not positive) on the boyfriend (later husband) by his ordering methods, quantity judgments, and gregarious consumption habits. This book is not about the quality of the finely sliced vegetables in a beautiful spring roll, and it is refreshing to escape that book model, fine as it may be.

This book is really about important moments in people’s lives and how food connects to those memories. It is funny, sad, warming, and weird.

Labels: bauer, fiction, food, nobel

posted by reader kay at 7:56 AM | 0 comment(s)