About the Author

YASUKUNI KAWABATA was born in 1899. He described himself as a child "without home or family" and became, in the novelist Mishima's words, "a perpetual traveler." He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. From the following year he lived in a middle-school dormitory, and in 1917 he left his native Osaka to join the First High School in Tokyo.

His earliest known work, a diary he kept at the age of fourteen about the last few weeks before his grandfather's death, is disturbing for someone so young and reflects the same cold pathos that marks his later fiction. His reputation, however, was not really made until the publication of a short novel in 1927, The Izu Dancer, which describes a brief encounter between a high-school student and the child dancer of the title.

Probably his best-known work, Snow Country, was completed in 1947 and deals with an affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a hotspring geisha; its evocation of the loneliness and sadness of life has served, more than any other of his novels, to establish the Kawabata image. The Lake itself belongs to his most productive decade following the end of World War II and was first serialized in 1954, along with two other major works, The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain. His last two novels, House of the Sleeping Beauties and The Old Capital, were both published in the early sixties, the former being a memorable story of an old man who spends four nights in a brothel with young girls drugged into a sleep from which they cannot be awakened. Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968, and committed suicide alone in his apartment near the sea in 1972.

The Translator: REIKO TSUKIMURA, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, was born in Tokyo and studied at Japan Women's University. She received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University and has held academic positions at the University of British Columbia, Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Toronto, where she taught for twenty-one years. Now retired, she continues to conduct research on Japanese literature and Buddhism, and to lecture on haiku in the Continuing Studies Program, University of Victoria, while enjoying her hobbies of year-round gardening, hiking, and painting.

Her many articles in English and Japanese deal with the dynamic interplay between Japanese and Western culture and between tradition and modernity. She has translated, among other works, I Am Alive: The Tanka Poems of Goto Miyoko, 1898-1978 (1988) and Sengai: Master Zen Painter. She also edited, and wrote the introduction for, Life, Death and Age in Modern Japanese Fiction (1978).

Reviews

"Seizes the reader's imagination from the first page...." -Village Voice
"Compact and immense ... hypnotic and shocking." -The New York Times Book Review
"A work of so unusual a nature as to throw new light on the whole of Kawabata's distinguished career." -Donald Keene
"This unusual and striking story probes the mysterious relation between beauty and evil." -Publishers Weekly
.".. one senses here the presence of an intensely Japanese, yet universal, master of the erotic."-SR/World


"Seizes the reader's imagination from the first page...." -Village Voice
"Compact and immense ... hypnotic and shocking." -The New York Times Book Review
"A work of so unusual a nature as to throw new light on the whole of Kawabata's distinguished career." -Donald Keene
"This unusual and striking story probes the mysterious relation between beauty and evil." -Publishers Weekly
.,." one senses here the presence of an intensely Japanese, yet universal, master of the erotic."-SR/World


"Seizes the reader's imagination from the first page...." -Village Voice
"Compact and immense ... hypnotic and shocking." -The New York Times Book Review
"A work of so unusual a nature as to throw new light on the whole of Kawabata's distinguished career." -Donald Keene
"This unusual and striking story probes the mysterious relation between beauty and evil." -Publishers Weekly
, .." one senses here the presence of an intensely Japanese, yet universal, master of the erotic."-SR/World

"Seizes the reader's imagination from the first page...." -Village Voice
"Compact and immense ... hypnotic and shocking." -The New York Times Book Review
"A work of so unusual a nature as to throw new light on the whole of Kawabata's distinguished career." -Donald Keene
"This unusual and striking story probes the mysterious relation between beauty and evil." -Publishers Weekly
.,." one senses here the presence of an intensely Japanese, yet universal, master of the erotic."-SR/World