Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata

1968 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kawabata's second novel, Thousand Cranes is the story of a cosmopolitan man in his mid-twenties who gets onvolved, in various ways, with his deceased father's two mistresses, and the daughter of one of them, after his mother's funeral. Kawabata is primarily a poet, and he carries the spare, almost minimal language of his poetry over to this novel with an almost astonishing precision; Kawabata uses as few words as possible to infuse the reader with emotion, and does so quite well at all turns.

As is to be expected, not terribly much actually happens here, with most of the truly important things happening inside the head of Kikujo, the unwitting (anti?)hero of the novel, who is buffeted this way and that by the machinations of the women around him, and watches, rendered helpless by a combination of his own indecision and the spite of another, as the house of cards that has been built up around him collapses in slow, oddly beautiful, motion.

It is the prose work of a master poet, and one of the best in that regard; definitely worth a look. *** 1/2