Book by Japan Bonsai Association Directors Staff

Masters' Book of Bonsai

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Bonsai Assn Japan

Gardening & Landscape Design

KODANSHA AMERICA +

Contemporary Japanese Houses Volume 2

Terry, Charles S.

Hokusai: 36 Views of Mt. Fuji

Narazaki

Utamaro : Standard

Sadao Kikuchi

Muneshige Narazaki

Asian Fighting Arts

Robert W. Smith

Donn F. Draeger

Chinese Home Cooking

Julia Chin Cheng

Living Treasures of Japan

Adachi

Bonsai With American Trees

Masakumi Kawasumi

The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream--the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is "an angel's," the figures of two students he follows seem to "glide over the green grass that hid their knees." Reality is the durable ugliness that is his constant companion and is symbolized in the grotesque deformity of the hero's feet. And it is the irreconcilable nature of these worlds that explains the strangely dehumanized, shadowy quality of the eroticism that pervades this novel. 
In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a "happening," making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata's works. Just as the hero's interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry.

The Lake

Literature & Fiction

Yasunari, Kawabata

Contemporary

Textile Designs 2

Nihon Sen'I Isho Senta, Osaka

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