In the 1920s, Asakusa was to Tokyo what Montmartre had been to 1890s Paris and Times Square was to be to 1940s New York. Available in English for the first time, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, captures the decadent allure of this entertainment district, where beggars and teenage prostitutes mixed with revue dancers and famous authors. Originally serialized in a Tokyo daily newspaper in 1929 and 1930, this vibrant novel uses unorthodox, kinetic literary techniques to reflect the raw energy of Asakusa, seen through the eyes of a wandering narrator and the cast of mostly female juvenile delinquents who show him their way of life. Markedly different from Kawabata's later work, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa shows this important writer in a new light. The annotated edition of this little-known literary gem includes the original illustrations by Ota Saburo. The annotations illuminate Tokyo society and Japanese literature, bringing this fascinating piece of Japanese modernism at last to a wide audience.

'Fra le opere di un grande scrittore si potrebbero annoverare quelle che corrispondono al dritto di una medaglia, o di una moneta, e il cui significato è evidente e visibile, e le altre che appartengono al rovescio della medaglia, e il cui significato è celato, nascosto, sul retro. Volendo, si potrebbe confrontarle rispettivamente al buddhismo essoterico e a quello esoterico. Nel caso di Kawabata, 'Il paese delle nevi' rientra nella prima categoria, mentre 'La casa delle belle addormentate' è indubbiamente un capolavoro esoterico.' (Yukio Mishima)

Questi cinque racconti giovanili, scritti intorno agli anni Trenta, rivelano già nel loro stile nitido e sensuale l'inconfondibile universo narrativo di Kawabata. Forse più che in ogni altro scrittore giapponese, la donna è al centro dell'interesse e delle ossessioni di questo narratore: la donna, o meglio il corpo femminile, come incessante oggetto di indagine e come enigma affascinante di cui occorre carpire il segreto. Anche in ciascuno di questi racconti campeggiano indimenticabili ritratti femminili: con una sensibilità estranea alla cultura occidental, Kawabata offre un ventaglio di situazioni pervase di un erotismo a volte sottile e diffuso, a volte cupo e violento.

Le opere di Kawabata, uno dei massimi scrittori giapponesi, sono pubblicate in Italia dal 1959, ma la fama dell'autore crebbe soprattutto dopo il conferimento del premio Nobel. Questo Meridiano, il primo di un autore giapponese, offre una scelta ragionata dei suoi testi, alcuni molto conosciuti altri mai tradotti, che mettono in luce la varietà dei toni della sua narrativa: da un raffinato erotismo alla sperimentazione vicina al dadaismo e al surrealismo.

L'opera di Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) tende a conferire alla bellezza un valore assoluto che trascenda il tempo e lo spazio. Nel caso specifico di Mille gru e della sua continuazione, Il disegno del piviere, esse sono rappresentate da due giovani donne, Fumiko e Yukiko, le cui esistenze ruotano intorno al protagonista maschile, Kikuji, che sembra riflettere il punto di vista dello scrittore. Il giovane aspira alla purezza sopra ogni altra cosa, sentendosi irrimediabilmente prigioniero delle ossessioni di un passato ritenuto peccaminoso, dunque rifiutato. Il suo 'bisogno di verginità' è reso ancora più evidente ne Il disegno del piviere quando, dopo le nozze con Yukiko, decide più o meno coscientemente di astenersi dai rapporti sessuali con lei, inaccessibile nella sua purezza e nella sua bellezza. Kawabata utilizza dunque le figure femminili per dar corpo al proprio concetto di un amore ideale, puro e senza macchia, intangibile. È la donna a ispirare un tale sentimento nell'uomo: e questo è il caso, come abbiamo visto, di Yukiko. È solo la donna che sa viverlo compiutamente, con tutta se stessa: e questo è il caso dell'altro personaggio femminile, Fumiko, che dopo essersi data, in Mille gru, al giovane, decide di sparire dalla sua vita, sacrificandosi per lui e continuando ad amarlo, lontano e irraggiungibile, come appare dalle sue splendide lettere, che costituiscono il nucleo centrale de Il disegno del piviere.

Il carteggio tra Mishima e Kawabata è un documento interessante sia dal punto di vista letterario che da quello umano. L'ultima lettera di Mishima è scritta pochi giorni prima del suo drammatico suicidio rituale, nel 1970. Kawabata gli sopravviverà dodici anni, e nel 1972 seguirà l'esempio del discepolo dandosi la morte.

In 'Mille gru', vita e morte si intrecciano ineluttabilmente, sino a coincidere. Il protagonista, il giovane Kikuji, vive sulle tracce del padre defunto, frequentando le antiche amanti di lui, nell'impossibilità di prescindere dalla figura paterna. La giovane Fumiko, parallelamente, vive il suo rapporto con Kikuji nell'impossibilità di prescindere dalla figura materna. Sono dunque i morti, più dei vivi, ad avere dimensione, purezza, vita senza tempo. Già uscito nel 2001 e ora riproposto in una nuova edizione arricchita da una nota biografica e da un'appendice iconografica, 'Mille gru' ha un seguito in 'Il disegno del piviere', disponibile nella stessa collana.

Con 'Il maestro di go' Kawabata ci offre il suo romanzo più spoglio e più essenziale, l'opera che più ebbe a cuore. Raccontando un torneo di go che si svolse realmente nel 1938, e che è rimasto celebre negli annali di quest'arte, lo scrittore analizza il dramma di un vecchio lottatore che soccombe. Infatti, sotto i paramenti di un cerimoniale quasi liturgico, nello scenario seducente di un albergo giapponese di campagna, il vecchio Maestro, l'eroe fino ad allora imbattuto di tanti altri 'incontri ', conduce il suo ultimo combattimento. In un clima ovattato ma carico di una tensione, il Maestro cadrà sotto i colpi di una stampa potente e affaristica, delle ambizioni della generazione in ascesa e degli intrighi del proprio ambiente.

First published in 1958, this collection of stories by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author explores characters broken by war, loss, and longing. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Preface by Donald Keene

Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) was probably written late in the ninth or early in the tenth century. Mention at the end of the tale that smoke still rose from Mount Fuji , a sign it was an active volcano, is an important clue to the date of composition, for we know that by 905 A.D. the mountain had ceased to emit smoke. Regardless of exactly when the tale was first set down on paper, it is the oldest surviving Japanese work of fiction; The Tale of Genji (written about 1010) referred to it as the 'ancestor of all romances.'

Many theories have been published about the authorship, but they are little more than guesses. The names of five suitors, resembling those of members of the Japanese court of the eighth century, have suggested to some scholars that the The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter was conceived of as a satire directed against a certain court faction, but this is not how the work was read in later centuries. Today it is thought of mainly as a children's story, and Kaguya-hime, the heroine, looks in the illustrations as lovable as Snow-White or Cinderella; there is no suggestions of the heartlessness that is perhaps her most memorable feature

Elements in the narrative recall similar tales from other parts of the world. The tests to which the suitors are subjected resemble the riddles asked by the icy Princess Turandot, or we may recall the three caskets among which the suitors had to choose in The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the tests Kaguya-hime imposes is the humor with which they are related. The second suitor's lyrical description of the magical island of Horai, where he allegedly found the jeweled branch, is interrupted by the mundane demands of the artisans who actually made it. Again, the fourth suitor, at the end of his unsuccessful quest, urges his men to stay away from the vicinity of the house of 'that thief of a Kaguya-hime.' Such a characterization of the heroine takes us from the realm of the children's story.

Many texts of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter have come down, each with its share of variant. The names of the characters differ somewhat from text to text or even within the same text. The differences are not confined to names: towards the end, when the old man is attempting to prevent Kaguya-hime from being taken off to the moon, he urges his men to shoot anything they see in the sky, no matter how small, and they assure him that they will shoot down 'even a mosquito.' But other texts mention not a mosquito but a bat; perhaps some scribe thought it was a bit too farfetched for anyone to shoot down a mosquito, and changed the word to a larger flying object.

There are other problems in the text. Near the beginning the Bamboo Cutter says of himself that he is over seventy years old, but towards the end (twenty years later) we are told that he has just turned fifty. It seems likely that there was a copyist's error, but some scholars, taking the figure given at the end as the Bamboo cutter's real age, have suggested that twenty years earlier, when he was only thirty, he may have been one of the suitors for Kaguya-hime's hand. Such problems in the text should not, however, prevent us from enjoying the storyteller's art.

About thirty-five years ago I first published a translation of The Tales of the Bamboo Cutter in the journal Monumenta Nipponica. A few years later-in the summer of 1965-a Japanese publisher conceived the plan of a book that would incorporate my translation, the translation into modern Japanese by the great novelist Yasunari Kawabata, and illustrations by one of the outstanding contemporary Japanese painters. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to revise my translation.

About this time, I visited an exhibition of kirie (paper-cut pictures) by Masayuki Miyata, and discovered that he had actually completed series of works illustrating The Tale if the Bamboo Cutter. I was delighted that at last it would be possible to realize the project first conceived so many years before. There were still further delays, but at last the book has materialized. It combines the work of unknown Japanese writer of over a thousand years ago, the translation by a master of modem Japanese, illustrations by an outstanding artist, and a translation by an American who has devoted his life to the study of Japanese literature.

One of the most influential figures in modern Japanese fiction, Yasunari Kawabata is treasured for the intensity of his perception and the compressed elegance of his style. This new collection includes twenty-two stories now appearing in English for the first time in book form. Written between 1923 and 1929, these short fictions form a shadow biography of the author's early years, and provide fresh glimpses of Kawabata's haunting and haunted vision.
Born in 1899, Kawabata committed suicide at age seventy-two. Throughout his life he was concerned with themes of loss, longing, and memory. His childhood was repeatedly shaken by deaths in the family - first his parents when he was three, then a grandmother, an older sister, and finally the blind grandfather he cared for in his early adolescence. These personal losses linger as motifs in such remarkable stories as 'Gathering Ashes' and 'The Master of Funerals.' The stark physical details of caregiving - suffused with edgy resentment and desperate fear - are remembered in 'Diary of My Sixteenth Year.'
In addition to the twenty-two stories unknown to American readers, this collection features the first translation of the complete text of the classic 'Dancing Girl of Izu.' This unforgettable story portrays the tender anxiety of a young man whose brooding fascination with a pubescent girl nudges him along the path toward adulthood.

With a restraint that barely conceals the ferocity of his characters' passions, one of Japan's great postwar novelists tells the luminous story of Kikuji and the tea party he attends with Mrs. Ota, the rival of his dead father's mistress. A tale of desire, regret, and sensual nostalgia, every gesture has a meaning, and even the most fleeting touch or casual utterance has the power to illuminate entire lives--sometimes in the same moment that it destroys them. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker.



"A novel of exquisite artistry...rich suggestibility...and a story that is human, vivid and moving."--New York Herald Tribune


Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible. This is a tragedy in soft focus, but its passions are fierce."--Commonweal

Records the struggles of the Master as he attempts to defend his title and ideals while playing a young challenger in the Japanese game of go

By day Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundation of Shingo's life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and uneasy stirrings of sexual desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments - and the tiny shifts of loyalty and affection that threaten to sever it irreparably - Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting.

With the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata tells a story of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan, the snowiest region on earth. It is there, at an isolated mountain hotspring, that the wealthy sophisticate Shimamura meets the geisha Komako, who gives herself to him without regrets, knowing that their passion cannot last.
Shimamura is a dilettante of the feelings; Komako has staked her life on them. Their affair can have only one outcome. Yet, in chronicling its doomed course, one of Japan's greatest modern writers creates a novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

Basato sulla vera storia di un torneo di Go svoltosi nel 1938 e rimasto celebre negli annali di quest'arte, Kawabata traccia il dramma di un vecchio maestro destinato a venire per la prima volta sconfitto. In una atmosfera tesa ma carica di una mistica ritualità l'anziano giocatore conduce per l'ultima volta il suo gioco, perdendo, più che con un avversario in carne e ossa, con un sistema affaristico privo di un'anima.