VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW
Vintage Book Review: Thousand Cranes
It’s been called ‘The Japanese Lolita,’ but it’s far more than that
Published in
7 min readJul 9, 2023
Three books earned Yasunari Kawabata his Nobel Prize in Literature: Snow Country, The Old Capitol, and this one—Thousand Cranes. Variously called the Japanese Nabokov and Marguerite Duras (latter, by former University of Rochester professor David Pollack), he was a master at deconstructing modern forms of traditions.
Thousand Cranes takes on the Japanese tea ceremony. He made a point of that, too—some reviewers had claimed his novel focused on the beauty of the tea ceremony. Kawabata rejected that outright, saying it was a criticism of the vulgarity the ceremony had fallen into.
Kawabata’s been on my reading list for a while, and having finally scored a copy of Thousand Cranes—well, it’s time to talk about it.
The Highlights:
- In a Sentence: Beautiful, haunting, and deeply spiritual.
- Author: Yasunari Kawabata
- Published: 1952, Chikuma Shobō, Kuramae (sort of. It was serialized before that, from 1949–1951, in several newspapers)
- Genre: Japanese Literature
- Recommended For: People who want a very real and…
