The Rainbow

About

In postwar Japan, two sisters navigate the wreckage of their country and their family with very different strategies for survival. One retreats into propriety; the other reaches for freedom. Between them, Kawabata draws the tension of a society trying to rebuild itself while its women discover that the old rules no longer hold — and that the new ones haven't been written yet. Yasunari Kawabata's novel captures the anguish and beauty of postwar Japan through the intimate lens of two women's lives. The prose is characteristically precise, each image carrying the weight of everything the characters cannot say aloud. A novel about the impossible task of being a woman in a country that is reinventing everything except its expectations of women.