Тисяча журавлів

Postwar Japan. The seemingly gentle and harmonious tea ceremony conceals the tension among those present and exposes underlying pain. Kikuji mourns the loss of his father while also feeling an unexplainable attraction to his former lover. Kawabata presents not a fast-paced plot but an emotional state as delicate as porcelain cups — exposed to ghosts from the past. A quiet story where silence communicates the main message.

The book is supplemented by the author's Nobel lecture, translated by Yulia Osadcha, who also standardized all the Japanese terms—according to the transcription and transliteration system approved at a methodological seminar by a group of Japanese language teachers from the Department of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Philology at the Institute of Philology of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2011.