Dandelions

Description

The exquisite last novella by Nobel Prizewinner Yasunari Kawabata In a dreamlike Japanese town on the banks of the Ikuta River, Ineko loses the ability to see certain things. It begins with a ping-pong ball and progresses to her fiance, whom she cannot see at all. The doctors call it somagnosia, and Ineko's mother and her fiance place her in a psychiatric clinic to recover. As they walk home along the riverbank, they consider- is her condition really a form of madness? Is Ineko's selective blindness an expression of her love? Are the trees around them weeping? Delicate, strange and spare, this novella carries the art of the novel into tantalizing and mysterious new realms.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1899 and before the Second World War had established himself as his country's leading novelist. Among his major works are Snow Country, A Thousand Cranes and The Master of Go. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he died in 1972.

Yasunari Kawabata's lusciously peculiar novel Dandelions was unfinished when he took his life in 1972. It's a story of love and loss and mania, told in sparse, arresting prose * Paris Review * Kawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time -- New York Times Book Review There are few other writers who could invoke such a lasting memory of a single image with so few words. * San Francisco Chronicle * A literary habitat like no other?quietly devastating fiction. Behind a lyrical and understated surface, chaotic passions pulse * The Independent *