Snow Country (16 page)

*
About four yards square.

†
In imitation of the birds. Literally: “To the cemetery, a hundred yards, a hundred yards, a hundred yards again.”

‡
The line is from a Kabuki play.

ALSO BY
YASUNARI KAWABATA

BEAUTY AND SADNESS

“Distinguished by purity, supreme clarity of mind and elegiac tone … endlessly provocative and original.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

In this coolly mesmerizing, eerily suggestive novel, the destructive love affair between a married writer and a teenage girl continues to haunt them twenty-four years after their last embrace—even as its lingering bitterness poisons everyone around them. Shifting unpredictably between tenderness and obsession, serenity and savagery,
Beauty and Sadness
confirms Kawabata’s reputation as a modern master.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76105-5

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