First Snow on Fuji by Yasunari Kawabata

First Snow on Fuji by Yasunari Kawabata

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.

YASUNARI KAWABATA was born in 1899. He described himself as a child without home or family and became, in the novelist Mishima's words, a perpetual traveler. He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. In
1917 he left his native Osaka to enter a school in Tokyo, and in 1927-three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University-he published a short novel, The Izu Dancer. Probably his best-known work, Snow Country, was completed in 1947 and has come to typify the sense of loneliness and chilly
lyricism associated with the world of Kawabata. In his most fertile decade following the end of World War II he produced The Lake, first serialized in 1954, along with two major novels-The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain. House of the Sleeping Beauties was published in the early sixties,
and Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968. He died in 1972.

EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER, the translator, was born in Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado, and at the outbreak of the Pacific War was assigned to the Navy Language School, where he studied Japanese. After further work at Columbia and Harvard, he settled in Japan in 1948, and spent over ten
years there, the first two as a diplomat. After a spell of teaching at Stanford, in 1966 he became Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan, and it was during the following years in Ann Arbor that most of The Tale of Genji was translated. He is currently Professor of Japanese at Columbia
University, teaching for half the year, and living the remaining half in Tokyo.

Among his other translations are a number of works by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio. In recognition of his role in the introduction of Japanese literature abroad, Professor Seidensticker was awarded the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize and the Order of the Rising Sun-one of
the Japanese government's highest honors.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781582430225
ISBN 10	1582430225
Title	First Snow on Fuji
Author	Yasunari Kawabata
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Counterpoint
Year published	1999-10-30
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.