Beauty and Sadness
Updated: Aug 8
Beauty and Sadness is, like the other Yasunari Kawabata novels I’ve read, deceptively simple, wonderfully subtle, and written in a clean and unhurried style I find incredibly alluring. I knew what I was in for, was coming back for exactly that, and got everything I was expecting. But that I chose this as my next book immediately after reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—another great work of understated beauty—no doubt enhanced its lingering impact.
The story itself is captivating: a long-ago affair between a married older man and an underage girl, the famously successful novel he wrote about it, his desire after many years to see his old love again, and her current lover’s desire to exact revenge on him. But reducing the novel to its plot points feels—more so here than most—like a grave injustice to the craft and lyricism with which it was written. Like Cannery Row, Beauty and Sadness is far more than the sum of its parts.
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