Book Description
A beautiful translation of ten short stories from Nobel
Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata.
"Kawabata lusted for purity; his characters live the
contradiction." -Boston Globe
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.