The Rainbow - 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, disturbing days together - seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan's greatest writers. Translated by Haydn Trowell

Review

This elegant classic by a Nobel laureate portrays a more passionate side of post-war Kyoto … From maple leave against a wide blue sky to black camellias standing in a bamboo vase, Kawabata’s prose gives pride of place to fleeting moments of natural beauty … at once a well-told story and a loving portrait of a family in transition -- Christopher Harding ― TelegraphThis fine novel is full of surprises.. [Kawabata] was a minimalist, whose work embraces minimalism’s hopeful assumption that, in the right hands, a string of minute details―a phrase, an unspoken gesture, a linking of gazes―may unlock a multitude of meanings. Look closely, listen carefully, is the first tacit message of Kawabata’s novels. The second is, Let my story burrow inward. There is more here than meets the eye and ear -- Brad Leithauser ― Wall Street JournalIn this masterpiece Kawabata, his brush dipped in silver, renders all the excruciating anguish and beauty of post-war Japan -- Edmund WhiteIt is impossible to understand the soul of Japan without reading Yasunari Kawabata. Snow Country is his greatest hit, a beautiful novel that both reflected and shaped Japanese culture, but The Rainbow - translated into English for the first time - is Kawabata's missing classic. The Rainbow is where modern Japan begins - a nation born again in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, and in its bitter-sweet tale of two sisters is also the story of a nation struggling to find a way to live in the rubble and ruins. As always with Japan's greatest novelist, his themes - the bonds of family, wounds that will never heal , love that endures and loser boyfriends - are painfully universal. A book for anyone who loves Japan, or great story-telling, or both. Dazzling, brilliant, unmissable. -- Tony ParsonsKawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time ― The New York Times Book ReviewKawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible ― Commonweal

About the Author

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.

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