Thousand Cranes - a novel by Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata

L TuT Books

1992

147 páginas

4h 54m

ISBN-10: 0801035333

This is a story og love given and love withheld. Gleaming with sudden passages of poetic beauty, it a tautly told and almost unbearably dramatic novel set in modern Japan. But its dominating theme of retribution for the sins of the father is as universal as the Pentateuch, as modern as Eugene O'Neil.

Kawabata has much in common with O'Neill's tender, tragic insight into family life, but he also has the Japanese delight in the visible world, in the joy of the senses.

We come upon Kikuji; whose story this is, on his way to tea with one of his father's mistresses, Chikako. But he is really on his way to act out the unfinished drama of his father's life. His father had been a cultivated man, an art-lover, a pleasure-seeker. One mistress, Chikako, he had cast off. But he gave his love to another, Mrs. Ota, until his death.

Kikuji, like his father, tries to escape from Chikako, now masculine and meddlesome. Like his father, he is drawn to Mrs. Ota, who has remained young, alluring, and pliant even though her daughter, Fumiko, is twenty and lovely.

Kikuji's passion for Mrs. Ota, her sudden death, and the efforts of her daughter to appease the family fate carry the story to a stunning climax. When Fumiko and Kikuji have tea together, the symbols of the two fine old China bowls, one male, one female, shine out clearly. Fumiko's fate is foreshadowed when she forces Kikuji to break the female bowl, and with it the tragic circle of their lives. The ending of this simple story of ill-fated love shatters the heart.