川端康成 Volgorde van de boeken

Leurs yeux se cherchA]rent et au moment oA leurs regards allaient se fondre, les bras de l'homme l'attirA]rent vers lui et il posa son visage sur la jeune femme. - ImbA(c)cile ! dit Yumiko en repoussant la bouche de l'homme de la paume de sa main droite. Les dents n'A(c)taient-elles pas teintA(c)es par le poison des pilules que Yumiko lui avait enfoncA(c)es dans la bouche ? Elles avaient fondu en libA(c)rant le liquide. - DA(c)cidA(c)ment, tu n'es qu'un imbA(c)cile ! Akagi blAamit soudain et s'effondra. Yasunari Kawabata.Chronique d'Asakusa, ou la banale histoire de Yumiko, une jeune femme qui voulait croire aux merveilles de l'amour dans le Tokyo des annA(c)es 30. Texte intA(c)gral

Thousand Cranes is a story of love given and love withheld. Set against the backdrop of Japan's traditional tea ceremony, it is a taut, highly dramatic novel gleaming with sudden passages of poetic beauty. In one of the book's strongest scenes, the two characters are symbolized by the two fine old China bowls, one female and one male, that sit before them. The novel opens with Kikuji on his way to a tea ceremony given by Chikako, one of his father's former mistresses. He is also on his way to act out the unfinished drama of his father's life. Kikuji's father had been a cultivated man, an art lover and a pleasure seeker. He had cast off one mistress, Chikako, but had loved another, Mrs Ota, until his death. Kikuji, like his father, tries to escape from Chikako, now masculine and meddlesome. Like his father, too, he is drawn to Mrs Ota, who has remained young, alluring and pliant even though her daughter, Fumiko, is only twenty years old. Kikuji's guilty passion for Mrs Ota and Fumiko's efforts to alter the family fate lead to the novel's stunning climax.

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.