Beauty and Sadness

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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
  • WINNER | 1968
    Nobel Prize
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Japan’s most distinguished novelists, he published his first stories while he was still in high school, graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His short story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Kawabata authored numerous novels, including Snow Country (1956), which cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent voices of his time, as well as Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1970), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). He served as the chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan for several years and in 1959 he was awarded the Goethe Medal in Frankfurt. Kawabata died in 1972. View titles by Yasunari Kawabata

About

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

Awards

  • WINNER | 1968
    Nobel Prize

Author

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Japan’s most distinguished novelists, he published his first stories while he was still in high school, graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His short story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Kawabata authored numerous novels, including Snow Country (1956), which cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent voices of his time, as well as Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1970), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). He served as the chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan for several years and in 1959 he was awarded the Goethe Medal in Frankfurt. Kawabata died in 1972. View titles by Yasunari Kawabata

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