Beauty and Sadness (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Yasunari Kawabata
- First Published: 1965
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: 1961
- Setting: Kyoto and Kamakura, Japan
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- 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: Kyoto, Japan
Characters Discussed
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 Year’s Eve. Instead of...
[The entire page is 792 words long]

