Izu Dancer and Other Stories

Izu Dancer and Other Stories
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2011-12-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1462902162

This Japanese literature collection contains four translated stories from two of Japan's most beloved and acclaimed fiction writers. The Izu Dancer, Yasunari Kawabata's first work to bring him recognition as a writer, is a novella about six Izu Peninsula travelers. As the six travelers journey together, intimacy develops and friendship overcomes class differences. Capturing the shy eroticism of adolescence, The Izu Dancer is a charming picture of the times. Yasushi Inoue's The Counterfeiter, although set in modern times, poses universal questions that transcend culture an era. Abasute and The Full Moon both explore themes of separation, loneliness, and isolation. Through the gloomy tales, Inoue's compassion shines, revealing yet another aspect of an author known for his vivid precision and economy of words. Inoue's stories are at least partially autobiographical, and Inoue's attitudes toward human destiny and fatalism are strongly influenced by his separation from his parents at an early age—yet all of his stories reveal his great compassion for his fellow human being.

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories

The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 177
Release: 1998-08-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1887178945

A collection of twenty-three stories from one of the most influential figures in modern Japanese literature. Yasunari Kawabata is widely known for his innovative short stories, some called "palm-of-the-hand" stories short enough to fit into ones palm. This collection reflects Kawabata's keen perception, deceptive simplicity, and the deep melancholy that characterizes much of his work. The stories were written between 1923 and 1929, and many feature autobiographical events and themes that reflect the painful losses he experienced early in his life.

House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525434143

Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.

First Snow on Fuji

First Snow on Fuji
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2000-10-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1582431051

The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not–knowing. Kawabata lets us slide into the lives of people who have been shattered by war, loss, and longing. These stories are beautiful and melancholy, filled with Kawabata's unerring vision of human psychology. First Snow on Fuji was originally published in Japan in 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize. Kawabata selected the stories for this collection himself, and the result is a stunning assembly of disparate moods and genres. This new edition is the first to be published in English.

Thousand Cranes

Thousand Cranes
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307833666

A luminous story of desire, regret, and the almost sensual nostalgia that binds the living to the dead—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner and author of Snow Country. "A stunning economy, delicacy of feeling, and a painter’s sensitivity to the visible world.” —The Atlantic While attending a traditional tea ceremony in the aftermath of his parents’ deaths, Kikuji encounters his father’s former mistress, Mrs. Ota. At first Kikuji is appalled by her indelicate nature, but it is not long before he succumbs to passion—a passion with tragic and unforeseen consequences, not just for the two lovers, but also for Mrs. Ota’s daughter, to whom Kikuji’s attachments soon extend. Death, jealousy, and attraction convene around the delicate art of the tea ceremony, where every gesture is imbued with profound meaning.

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005-04-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0520241827

A new translation of the only work not currently available in English by a Nobel-Prize winning author and the best known Japanese writer outside of Japan.

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2006-11-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374530491

Collection of short stories written over the entire span of Kawabata's career. These stories, he felt, represented the essence of his art and reflect his abiding interest in the miniature, the wisp of plot reduced to the essential. --Adapted from publisher description.

The Sound of the Mountain

The Sound of the Mountain
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-02-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307833658

From the Nobel Prize-winning writer and acclaimed author of Snow Country comes a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age—about an elderly Tokyo businessman who must face the failures of his memory and the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate the end of a life. “A rich, complicated novel.... Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata’s is the closest to poetry.” —The New York Times Book Review 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, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories
Author: Theodore William Goossen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0192803727

Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the entire development of the Japanese short story.

Kusamakura

Kusamakura
Author: Natsume Soseki
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2008-01-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101097558

A stunning new English translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura—meaning “grass pillow”—follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty," is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of Soseki's word painting. In the author's words, Kusamakura is "a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty." Written at a time when Japan was opening its doors to the rest of the world, Kusamakura turns inward, to the pristine mountain idyll and the taciturn lyricism of its courtship scenes, enshrining the essence of old Japan in a work of enchanting literary nostalgia.