3 best Yasunari Kawabata books

The most exported and recognized Japanese narrative in the West maintains a certain communion with the spiritual among the merely existential. Authors like Murakami, Mishima or own Yasunari Kawabata, whom I quote today, they present us with very different stories but with a clearly identifiable background and with a singular taste for the detailed style that ends up serving the deepest characterization of characters, the mimetic description of scenes, situations and experiences.

It is precious literature capable of recovering clear impressions of the most traditional Japan at the same time that it can link with a certain western aspect in plots raised in cosmopolitan Tokyo, for example.

And the truth is that, in a reading world eager for miscegenation and novelty since the twentieth century, many of these Japanese writers are already world referents of letters.

In the case of Kawabata, with his 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, we can consider him to be, at least, the pioneer in this irruption of authors from the great Asian island.

Kawabata managed to lead the way thanks to his spiritual attunement through a rapturous sensitivity. The human is made up of the same intangible here and there. Kawabata traced stories of souls, desires, dreams, wandering spirits in search of horizons. And of all that there is a lot anywhere in the world.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Yasunari Kawabata

Snow country

Kawabata takes advantage of this novel to contribute his perspective on romantic love, idealized love, worn out love. Everything is part of the same emotional concept (the paradoxical expression is worth it).

Shimamura returns to the Land of Snow, a space with a poetic name that evokes adolescence, first love, that time frozen in memory and whose ice we are unable to break into adulthood. Frozen in that country was once his love for Komako, with the unique significance of her role as a geisha.

At times it can be sensed that the return of Shimamura refreshes the love lived between the two long ago. But love can be a mirage, an unattainable oasis that only leaves a pool in the present where you can rescue the crystalline water of love.

Perhaps for all that, Shimamura is disenchanted with life. Or maybe it's because of something else from that time when he didn't walk through Snow Country.

The character of Yoko, a second woman immersed in the impossible shared love completes a scene at times frantic and sometimes ruinous about the passions that remain, after all ...

Snow country

Thousand cranes

A lyrical novel, like almost everything proposed by Kawabata. The scene of the city of Kamakura seems to transport us to a mythological city where everything revolves around sensuality.

The most intense drives and desires can be appeased under the magisterium of eroticism, capable of embellishing low passions. A story about the tradition of the lovemaking arts, but also a deep rambling on the obsessions of sex.

The thousand cranes are that uncontrollable flight towards the sky of ecstasy that seems to be driven by impatient wings and that sensuality and eroticism try to accommodate to make it more human, less wild ...

Thousand cranes

The rumor of the mountain

The Japanese tradition has something more than the strictly figurative in aesthetics. The beauty of the forms, the artistic supposes in the Japanese imaginary a special connection with its animistic religiosity.

The human being as one of the most beautiful creations next to the rivers and the mountains, next to the animals with brilliant coats ... Osaga Shingo is the patriarch of a particular family.

On one side is his son Shuichi, in theory happily married to a beautiful and devoted woman like Kikuko. But the son has been flagging in his morale since he discovered the evil side of the world: war. As for the daughter, Fusaku, her marriage, as shipwrecked as her brother's, is already broken and she has no choice but to return to her parental home fleeing from a wicked husband.

The father, Osaga, observes them in their uncertain future, he would like to help them, but he knows that the path is that of each one. A father who suffers but not to a lesser extent than his children.

In a leisurely scenography, of splendorous dawns, the lives of the family members try to recompose themselves between the fatal sensation of a pressing solitude that can accompany them until the end of their days.

A melancholic sense of decadence serves to make the flash of descriptive beauty rise suddenly like a great thrill.

The rumor of the mountain
5/5 - (7 votes)