Available Formats
Thousand Cranes
By (Author) Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
15th July 2025
17th April 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Fiction in translation
895.6344
Paperback
144
Width 111mm, Height 181mm, Spine 15mm
200g
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress' rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1899 and before the Second World War had established himself as his country's leading novelist. Among his major works are Snow Country, A Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he died in 1972.