Yasuniri Kawabata Beauty and Sadness — Begun 2010.07.30

While looking for something else, I found

Beauty and Sadness in a stack of books being received at Renaissance Books last weekend. And so I've begun it, and it looks like it will be good. It caught my eye — it does have a very nice Japanese print on the cover, after all. But I bought it not just because of the cover, but because I am alway curious as to what it is in a book that warrants it getting a prize. In this case, the prize awarded was the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. Amusingly enough, Kawabata did not get the award for this book, but "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind" as it was expressed in three of his other novels: Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital.


Yasuniri Kawabata
Beauty and Sadness.
Vintage International (Vintage Books / Random House),
1996, ISBN: 0679761055.