The Rainbow

By: Yasunari Kawabata, Haydn Trowell (Translator)

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Paperback | 9 November 2023 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.62 x 13.51 x 1.19

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Available in English for the very first time, a powerful, poignant novel about three half sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country

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.

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.

Industry Reviews

In this masterpiece Kawabata, his brush dipped in silver, renders all the excruciating anguish and beauty of post-war Japan -- Edmund White

It 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 Parsons

Kawabata's novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time * The New York Times Book Review *

Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible * Commonweal *

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