This Japanese literature collection contains four translated stories from two of Japan's most beloved and acclaimed fiction writers. The Izu Dancer, Yasunari Kawabata's first work to bring him recognition as a writer, is a novella about six Izu Peninsula travelers. As the six travelers journey together, intimacy develops and friendship overcomes class differences. Capturing the shy eroticism of adolescence, The Izu Dancer is a charming picture of the times. Yasushi Inoue's The Counterfeiter, although set in modern times, poses universal questions that transcend culture an era. Abasute and The Full Moon both explore themes of separation, loneliness, and isolation. Through the gloomy tales, Inoue's compassion shines, revealing yet another aspect of an author known for his vivid precision and economy of words. Inoue's stories are at least partially autobiographical, and Inoue's attitudes toward human destiny and fatalism are strongly influenced by his separation from his parents at an early age—yet all of his stories reveal his great compassion for his fellow human being.

A collection of twenty-three stories from one of the most influential figures in modern Japanese literature. Yasunari Kawabata is widely known for his innovative short stories, some called "palm-of-the-hand" stories short enough to fit into ones palm. This collection reflects Kawabata's keen perception, deceptive simplicity, and the deep melancholy that characterizes much of his work. The stories were written between 1923 and 1929, and many feature autobiographical events and themes that reflect the painful losses he experienced early in his life.

Collection of short stories written over the entire span of Kawabata's career. These stories, he felt, represented the essence of his art and reflect his abiding interest in the miniature, the wisp of plot reduced to the essential. --Adapted from publisher description.

The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not–knowing. Kawabata lets us slide into the lives of people who have been shattered by war, loss, and longing. These stories are beautiful and melancholy, filled with Kawabata's unerring vision of human psychology. First Snow on Fuji was originally published in Japan in 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize. Kawabata selected the stories for this collection himself, and the result is a stunning assembly of disparate moods and genres. This new edition is the first to be published in English.

A stunning new English translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura—meaning “grass pillow”—follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or "beauty," is the center of this elegant novel, the still point around which the artist moves and the enigmatic subject of Soseki's word painting. In the author's words, Kusamakura is "a haiku-style novel, that lives through beauty." Written at a time when Japan was opening its doors to the rest of the world, Kusamakura turns inward, to the pristine mountain idyll and the taciturn lyricism of its courtship scenes, enshrining the essence of old Japan in a work of enchanting literary nostalgia.

A stunning memoir of an intercultural marriage gone wrong When Susan, a shy Midwesterner in love with Chinese culture, started graduate school in Hong Kong, she quickly fell for Cai, the Chinese man of her dreams. As they exchanged vows, Susan thought she'd stumbled into an exotic fairy tale, until she realized Cai—and his culture—where not what she thought. In her riveting memoir, Susan recounts her struggle to be the perfect traditional "Chinese" wife to her increasingly controlling and abusive husband. With keen insight and heart-wrenching candor, she confronts the hopes and hazards of intercultural marriage, including dismissing her own values and needs to save her relationship and protect her newborn son, Jake. But when Cai threatens to take Jake back to China for good, Susan must find the courage to stand up for herself, her son, and her future. Moving between rural China and the bustling cities of Hong Kong and San Francisco, Good Chinese Wife is an eye-opening look at marriage and family in contemporary China and America and an inspiring testament to the resilience of a mother's love—across any border.

From the Nobel Prize-winning writer and acclaimed author of Snow Country comes a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age—about an elderly Tokyo businessman who must face the failures of his memory and the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate the end of a life. “A rich, complicated novel.... Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata’s is the closest to poetry.” —The New York Times Book Review By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo’s life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker