Yasunari Kawabata

"With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters--born to the same father but different mothers--struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father's first child--haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final,...

" ... in his portrait of an elderly Tokyo businessman, Yasunari Kawabata charts the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illumunate its closing. By day, Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: with his disappointing...

"In the three surreal, erotically charged tales in this collection, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. These stories are piercing evocations of sexuality and human psychology-- and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty--that showcase one of the twentieth century's great writers at his very best."--Back cover.

Twenty-three stories by a Japanese writer. The subjects include beggars, Buddhist priests and love dramas. The story, Diary of My Sixteenth Year, is on the friendship of a boy and his grandfather.