| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exquisite elegy on the passing of Kyoto's traditions.,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Old Capital (Paperback)
For years I'd been anxiously awaiting another Kawabata novel to appear in translation. When I finally got a copy of "The Old Capital" I was initially disappointed because Seidenstecker wasn't the translator, but, if anything, I like Holman's style of translation better.
Cheiko, the novel's twenty-year-old heroine, embodies Kawabata's ideals of deep sensitivity, beauty, modesty, and virginal purity. She works in her parents' wholesale silk goods store, which is failing like so many traditional Kyoto shops because the Japanese are falling under the spell of Western cultural values. This is especially significant because Kyoto is the cultural center of Japan--the most ancient and traditional of her cities. The successful stores now carry Sony radios and other nontraditional items to satisfy new Western tastes. "Anything for a buck," quips the successful store owner's son.
A foundling raised by loving middle-class parents, Cheiko might seem to be on a kind of spiritual quest to find her lost background--rather, the book itself is on a quest to help her find her origins, for she unconsciously unravels the mystery without really trying.
Of all Kawabata's novels, this one most resembles "The Sound of the Mountain" in its exquisite evocation of beauty, sensitivity, and the invasion of Western values--but without the heartbreak attached. It's one of the few Kawabata novels that doesn't end in some tragedy or disappointment. Kawabata suffuses the story in a gentle patina of longing. His subtle humor softens any edges, as in the parents' comic insistence that they stole her as a baby when, in reality, she had been left in front of her father's shop. Cheiko doesn't know what to make of this, but she accepts it because she knows her parents love her.
According to the introduction, more translations of Kawabata novels are in the works. We can only be grateful. In the meantime, if you've read all his novels and stories in translation, you can either reread your favorites or learn Japanese!
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful... just wonderful...,
By
This review is from: The Old Capital (Hardcover)
This is my favorite Kawabata book and I've read quite a few. I think it is much better than more famous "Snow Country". It is also much more complex than other Kawabata books, which are somewhat similar in their repetitive descriptions of the relationship between weak man and unhappy woman. This book is mysterious, eerie, awe-inspiring, beautiful, touchingly tender and somewhat weird. At the center of the story are two female twins, their incomprehensible inner universes and strange sensibilities. "Old Capital" is Kyoto - ancient center of Japan and cradle of the beautiful Heian culture. The city is portrayed as a place where past is mixed with present and aestetic sensibilities is combined with everyday routine of protagonists, who are but simple people with their life centered around family, work and small bussinesses.
Reading this book in both Russian and English translations made me realize that a lot of meanings in the book are lost when it is translated in English, because of the complex system of dialogues where the manner of speech is changed accordingly to the status of people conversing and their relationship to each other. Russian, being a much more hierarhical and polite language than English, produces better translation, but than again - as I dont know Japanese, I cant really say how much inferior the translation is compared to the original work.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a departure, but still beautiful,
This review is from: The Old Capital (Paperback)
rather than the usual study of twisted eroticism and revenge, this story is amazingly calm, gentle but still wonderfully crafted. the emotions of muted longing and subtle sadness match perfectly with the descriptions of kyoto. well worth a read for kawabata fans.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 19 books citing this book
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
|
|
