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7 books

Screen adaptation

Beauty and Sadness

Yasunari Kawabata

A writer returns to Kyoto to revisit an old affair, reopening wounds that desire, memory and regret have never allowed to heal.

History

Screen adaptation

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

A love affair unfolds in a snowbound hot-spring landscape, where beauty, distance and isolation make each encounter feel both intimate and elusive.

Nonfiction

Screen adaptation

Snow Country and Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata

Two intimate Kawabata novels pair a mountain hot-spring romance with a tea-ceremony drama, revealing how desire becomes entangled with memory and restraint.

Nonfiction

The Master of Go

Yasunari Kawabata

A Go master's match against a younger challenger becomes a quietly absorbing struggle between discipline, tradition and the changing pace of Japanese life.

Nonfiction

Screen adaptation

The Old Capital

Yasunari Kawabata

Kyoto's festivals, crafts and changing seasons surround an adopted daughter whose discoveries about her past unsettle the life she has always known.

Literary fiction

Screen adaptation

The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata

An ageing businessman listens to the disappointments within his family, finding mortality and unresolved feeling in the ordinary rhythms of daily life.

Nonfiction

Screen adaptation

Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata

Tea ceremonies frame a restrained drama of desire and regret, as inherited attachments bind the living to people and choices from the past.

Literary fiction

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