Beauty and sadness

An erotic study of love and jealousy, this is Kawabata's haunting last novel before he committed suicide in 1972. On a nostalgic New Year journey to Kyoto, Oki, a middle-aged novelist seeks out the mistress he had abandoned some twenty years earlier. But Otoko, now a successful painter, has become involved with the beautiful ad talented Keiko. And it is Otako's vengeful young protegee who frustrates Oki's attempt to resurrect the past.

Kawabata uses his characteristic delicacy of touch to build up a tense atmosphere of menace and hysteria.