The Rainbow: A Novel

by Yasunari Kawabata

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

From the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Rainbow is a sweeping narrative of three interwoven half-sisters and their evolving concept of family. With plenty of unexpected twists and an engagingly empathetic tone, this is Kawabata at his best.

Available in English for the very first time, a powerful, poignant novel about three half sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country.

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father’s first child—haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together—seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan’s greatest writers. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593314920
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	282,276
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

YASUNARI KAWABATA, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of Japan's most distinguished novelists. Born in Osaka in 1899, he published his first stories while he was still in high school. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His story "The Izu Dancer," first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Among his major novels published in the United States are Snow Country (1956), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, in 1972.

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2023

Originally published in Japan in 1950 and appearing in English for the first time, this meandering family story from Nobel winner Kawabata (1899–1972; Snow Country) concerns a disjointed household in Tokyo. Mizuhara, an architect, is the patriarch. He has three daughters, born of three different mothers. The eldest, the rebellious Momoko, is taken in by Mizuhara after her mother died by suicide. Mizuhara raises Momoko alongside Asako, his daughter by marriage. He’s met his third daughter, Wakako, only once; she still lives with her courtesan mother in Kyoto. The novel is driven chiefly by Asako’s desire to find Wakako, whom she has never met, but learned about from her own mother, and by the scandalous behavior of Momoko, who allows herself to be seen in public with lovers and is distraught over the death of her former lover in WWII and her mother’s suicide. The book feels like a product of its era; at times it’s slow-moving and formal, punctuated by scenes of strong emotion almost theatrical in tone. This slim volume will be most appreciated by Kawabata completists. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Full of surprises . . . Kawabata was not the first modern Japanese novelist to be translated into English, but for many American readers he introduced a nation’s literary sensibility . . . The sympathy and solidity with which the young women [in The Rainbow] are etched is unusual in Kawabata’s oeuvre, and the book’s nifty, suspenseful plotting is rare, too . . . The reader watches in fascination as the lives of the three half-sisters, for all their separations of geography and blood, increasingly come to interweave . . . The Rainbow adds a valuable layer to the portrait of the artist revealed by his work.” —The Wall Street Journal

"The Rainbow is a work of great beauty and austerity, matched by Trowell’s fine translation . . . What commends it most, however, is its resistance to nostalgia in the face of catastrophe and its determination to find moments of transcendence amid tragedy. Everything, it reminds us, is as fleeting as snow itself.” —Financial Times

"Kawabata’s classic novel . . . The Rainbow is at once a well-told story and a loving portrait of a family in transition – as Japan was, during this deeply consequential period in its history." —The Telegraph

From the Publisher