The Lake (novel)
The Lake is a short 1954 novel by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. This book tells the story of a former schoolteacher named Gimpei Momoi. Beginning in Karuizawa, the novel alternates between the now middle-aged Momoi and recurring memories of a lake from his hometown, and his interactions with a number of women, beginning with a relative and the uncomfortable circumstances surrounding a death in his family. The novel then explores his connection to a woman who loses a purse full of several years' worth of money earned as a lover to an older man as well as a relationship with a student, Hisako, when Momoi is a teacher, a relationship that begins with a
somewhat odd-request for a good cure for a foot condition Momoi suffers
from and then examines the circumstances of Hisako's family, who are
well-off in the immediate post-war era. Finally, the now middle-aged
Momoi follows a young girl during a summer period leading up to a
festival and crosses path with a woman closer to his age.
One of Yasunari Kawabata's most famous novels was Snow Country, started in 1934 and first published in installments from 1935 through 1947. Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha,
which takes place in a remote hot-spring town somewhere in the
mountainous regions of northern Japan. It established Kawabata as one
of Japan's foremost authors and became an instant classic, described by
Edward G. Seidensticker as "perhaps Kawabata's masterpiece".
Thousand Cranes (千羽鶴, senbazuru?) is a novel by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. This was the first time any Japanese author won this prize.
