logo
Wrong email address or username
Wrong email address or username
Incorrect verification code
The Lake - Yasunari Kawabata, Reiko Tsukimura
The Lake
by: (author) (author)
4.28 45
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and... show more
The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream-the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is "an angel's," the figures of two students he follows seem to "glide over the green grass that hid their knees." Reality is the durable ugliness that is his constant companion and is symbolized in the grotesque deformity of the hero's feet. And it is the irreconcilable nature of these worlds that explains the strangely dehumanized, shadowy quality of the eroticism that pervades this novel. In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a "happening," making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata's works. Just as the hero's interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN: 9784770030016 (4770030010)
Publisher: Kodansha USA
Pages no: 160
Edition language: Japanese
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
Lotus wild over sakura
Lotus wild over sakura rated it
5.0
To the singing oars,Jump the watery imp,Moon-lit skies wake,Tender palms aglow,Lonely hearts to split,Weeping willows below,Cages with open doors,Fireflies over the lake.On a nearby tree, the screeching became louder with every passing minute. I knew it then, it was already past midnight. The bats w...
nouveau
nouveau rated it
5.0 The Lake
according to goodreads statistics, みづうみ is read to only a tenth the degree of Kawabata's other works, and perhaps justifiably so. if Kawabata's masterpieces are "works one must read before one dies," it's possible to go through life without ever reading Mizuumi, but why? a classic Kawabata in that e...
Traveller
Traveller rated it
Oh, lookie what I just by chance found last night when dusting off a shelf of books I had inherited from my father's library without looking at the titles properly!A 1974 first edition copy!I'll definitely be hanging on to this, dust or no dust!It's a hardcover with a dust jacket and all. Can you b...
Other editions (1)
Books by Reiko Tsukimura
Books by Yasunari Kawabata
On shelves
Share this Book
Need help?