never speaks. “It’d be nice if she’d say thank you at least,” the cabby says.
“But of course when ghosts talk they’re always complaining.”
At once a window into the very specific domestic world of postwar
Japan and a timeless depiction of the vagaries of humankind’s desires and
discontents, this remarkable collection evokes an unmistakably Japanese
sensibility in its delicacy, understatement, and lyricism.
Yasunari Kawabata is best known for his novels Snow Country, The
Sound the Mountain, and Thousand Cranes. His influences ranged from
French writing to Japanese linked verse, from the resonance of traditional
culture to the radical modernism of his contemporaries. The mentor of
Yukio Mishima, Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to be awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.
