Yasunari Kawabata: THOUSAND CRANES
There’s so much meaning in the train of simple and brief sentences that made up the novel Thousand Cranes by the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature Laureate, Yasunari Kawabata. Tea and the implements needed during tea ceremonies are used as metaphors for the convoluted relationships between characters. There’s the son who has had a sexual awakening from his (now dead) father’s mistress. There’s the matchmaker, who was also briefly the dead father’s mistress, who is scheming and manipulative. There’s the girl with the thousand-cranes kerchief. There’s the bereaved daughter of the mistress who has just killed herself. And so on.
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