On the surface, The Old Capital tells the story of a year in the life of a young woman in post-war Kyoto, who was adopted as a baby by a couple that owns a store for traditional Japanese clothes. By chance she meets her twin sister and through her learns about her own background. Subplots include two young men’s interest in her and also her adoptive father’s troubles with the changes progress is bringing to his world. However, underneath this simple and rather uninteresting storyline […]
The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.
This is an interesting and touching novel by the Nobel Prize winner from 1968 Yasunari Kawabata. His win is perfectly well-deserved as he’s a great writer, but I get the sense that the Nobel committee perhaps felt like they missed their chance with Junichiro Tanizaki dying a few years earlier, not necessarily wanting to risk giving the prize to Mishima. And Kawabata became a worthy if modest prize winner. This novel is not wholly a novel, and according to the introduction, was more of a […]
A Classic and a Classic and a Classic
The Picture of Dorian Gray – 5/5 Stars I wasn’t sure I was going to listen to this audiobook or not. I like the era (love Sherlock Holmes) and I’ve read a handful of Oscar Wilde plays, but never his fiction. Luckily, Simon Prebble is a great reader (he narrated The Moonstone earlier this year for me and I like that a lot), and it turns out this is a great novel. It’s interesting because I have a huge schema for what I thought this […]