Dandelions
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Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Michael Emmerich
Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, committed suicide in 1972, leaving behind an unfinished novel, which is finally available in English translation. Dandelions is a book about a young woman whose vision becomes so impaired that objects or people that she sees a moment before vanish into thin air—similar to a real medical condition called “somagnosia.” Kawabata’s work explores the loss and trauma of seeing countless loved ones die in the Second World War and the survivors’ guilt of the generation that remained.
New Directions, 128 pages, Rs 994
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