Snow Country (16 page)

The scream stabbed him through. At the spasm in Yoko’s leg, a chill passed down his spine to his very feet. His heart was pounding in an indefinable anguish.

Yoko’s leg moved very slightly, hardly enough to catch the eye.

Even before the spasm passed, Shimamura was looking at the face and the kimono, an arrow figure against a red ground. Yoko had fallen face up. The skirt of her kimono was pulled just over one knee. There was but that slight movement in her leg after she struck the earth. She lay unconscious. For some reason Shimamura did not see death in the still form. He felt rather that Yoko had undergone some shift, some metamorphosis.

Two or three beams from the collapsing balcony were burning over her head. The beautiful eyes that so pierced their object were closed. Her jaw was thrust slightly out, and her throat was arched. The fire flickered over the white face.

Shimamura felt a rising in his chest again as the memory came to him of the night he had been on his way to visit Komako, and he had seen that mountain light shine in Yoko’s face. The years and months with Komako seemed to be lighted up in that instant; and there, he knew, was the anguish.

Komako put her hands to her eyes and screamed, and even as the crowd held its breath in that first gasp she broke away from Shimamura and ran toward the fire.

The long geisha’s skirts trailing behind her, she staggered through the pools of water and the
charred bits of wood that lay scattered over the ground. She turned and struggled back with Yoko at her breast. Her face was strained and desperate, and beneath it Yoko’s face hung vacantly, as at the moment of the soul’s flight. Komako struggled forward as if she bore her sacrifice, or her punishment.

The crowd found its various voices again. It surged forward to envelop the two.

“Keep back. Keep back, please.” He heard Komako’s cry. “This girl is insane. She’s insane.”

He tried to move toward that half-mad voice, but he was pushed aside by the men who had come up to take Yoko from her. As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

BEAUTY AND SADNESS

“Distinguished by purity, supreme clarity of mind and elegiac tone … endlessly provocative and original.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

In this coolly mesmerizing, eerily suggestive novel, the destructive love affair between a married writer and a teenage girl continues to haunt them twenty-four years after their last embrace—even as its lingering bitterness poisons everyone around them. Shifting unpredictably between tenderness and obsession, serenity and savagery,
Beauty and Sadness
confirms Kawabata’s reputation as a modern master.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76105-5

THE ARK SAKURA
by Kobo Abe

An obsessed hermit, fearing imminent nuclear disaster, outfits a vast former quarry inside a mountain with everything necessary for the survival of a small community.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-72161-4

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS
by Junichiro Tanizaki

A classic of international literature,
The Makioka Sisters
is a poignant yet unsparingly observant portrait of four aristocratic Osaka women clinging to a vanishing way of life on the eve of World War II.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-76164-0

THE SOUND OF WAVES
by Yukio Mishima

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan,
The Sound of Waves
is about first love between a young fisherman and the daughter of a wealthy villager, amid the calumny and gossip of the villagers.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-75268-4

HARD BOILED WONDERLAND AND
THE END OF THE WORLD
by Haruki Murakami

In this hyperkinetic novel, Japan’s most popular fiction writer hurtles into the consciousness of the West, drawing readers into a highly stylized postmodern detective story.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-74346-4