The Old Capital
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A young woman in historic Kyoto grapples with secrets from her past in this lyrical work of Japanese literature from a Nobel Prize–winning author.
Set in the traditional Japanese city of Kyoto, The Old Capital tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige. As Chieko discovers the true facets of her past, she becomes bewildered and troubled by longing, the start of a poignant journey that captures the beauty of old Japan.
With the ethereal tone and aesthetic styling characteristic of Kawabata’s prose, The Old Capital is one of the three novels cited specifically by the Nobel Committee when they awarded Yasunari Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether this subtle and brooding novel, here making its first appearance in English, deserves to rank alongside Snow Country and Thousand Cranes as one of Kawabata's major works is debatable, but it contains all the Nobel laureate's most striking characteristicsacute esthetic sensibility, preoccupation with the clash between old and new, pervasive melancholy and a story line suggestive of a Zen brush-and-ink painting where what is omitted is as important as what is included. Set in Kyoto, the Japanese city most symbolic of tradition, the story centers on a young woman, Chieko, whohaving been brought up to think her parents stole her as a baby in a fit of passionate desireis profoundly disturbed to learn (after a chance encounter with a girl who turns out to be her sister) that her real parents had abandoned her. Her identity crisis is exacerbated by her need to choose between carrying on her adoptive father's kimono-designing business, now in decay, and leaving home to marry. It's an intensely poetic story in which much is evoked, little stated or concluded.
