Beauty and Sadness
by Yasunari Kawabata
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At a glance:
- Author: Yasunari Kawabata
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: 1961
- Setting: Kyoto and Kamakura, Japan
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Novel
- Subjects: 1960's, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Jealousy, envy, or resentment, Novelists, Lesbianism or lesbians, Adultery, Accidents, Revenge, Painting or painters, Japan or Japanese people, Miscarriage
- Locales: Asia, Japan, Kyoto, Japan
Characters Discussed
Toshio Oki
Toshio Oki, a fifty-four-year-old novelist. He is a sentimental man, in the ascetic and reserved manner of the Japanese aesthetic. When Toshio was thirty years old and newly married, he had an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl. He later fictionalized this affair, and the resulting book became his best, most acclaimed, and most enduring novel. He sets the present-time action of the novel going with an impulsive action: He arranges to meet his former mistress and to listen with her to the tolling of temple bells at midnight on New...
(The entire page is 818 words.)
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