Beauty and Sadness

Winner of the Nobel Prize 

Love as sickness and immortality, sex as entrapment and revenge—these are the themes that the Nobel Prize-winning author dramatizes with such cool and mesmerizing power in Beauty and Sadness. At its heart is a destructive love affair between a married writer and a teenage girl that continues to haunt both of them more than twenty years after their last embrace—and whose lingering bitterness poisons everyone around them. This novel confirms Kawabata's reputation as a modern Japanese master who can turn the tightening of an obi into something infinitely suggestive and perverse.

"Few authors have so compellingly evoked the subtle, precise beauty of his homeland. [Kawabata's] prose is clear, deceptively simple; yet the images scattered through his narratives link together to produce deep, sudden insight into the souls of his characters." —Time