The Thousand-Petaled Crane

«The fathers ate sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge» – a biblical quote that astonishingly accurately conveys the «upper», «plot» layer of Yasunari Kawabata's novel «The Thousand-Petaled Crane». The story of a nervous, introspective young man, Kikuchi, whose one of his deceased father’s mistresses obsessively tries to replace his mother and matchmake a bride for him, while another for some reason begins a romance with him, and he falls in love with her daughter, who, in turn, has complex and ambiguous feelings for him, would seem like a comedy if written by a Western author, but Kawabata was Japanese, and therefore his novel, saturated with national symbolism where the overarching images of the crane and the tea ceremony are only the most obvious among numerous allusions and references to the masterpieces of the Heian and samurai eras, was and remains one of the most brilliant, aristocratically refined, and ambiguous works of the past century.