Thousand Cranes

About

A young man becomes briefly entangled with the two former mistresses of his dead father, and with the daughter of one of them. The relationships are slight, provisional, haunted by the rituals of the tea ceremony that bring these people together and by the ghost of a man whose desires have outlived him. Yasunari Kawabata's novel suggests rather than states — the eroticism is muted, the emotions indirect, and the real drama plays out in the spaces between gestures. The tea ceremony becomes a metaphor for everything: beauty, contamination, the inheritance of appetite from one generation to the next. A novel about the strange combinations that desire produces when it passes through families like an heirloom no one asked to receive.