The Rainbow

Author Yasunari Kawabata
Narrator Ami Okumura Jones
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Run Time 5 hours and 55 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Classic fiction, Family life fiction, Fiction in translation, Narrative theme: Coming of age.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

©2023 Yasunari Kawabata (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

In this masterpiece Kawabata, his brush dipped in silver, renders all the excruciating anguish and beauty of post-war Japan

Edmund White

It is impossible to understand the soul of Japan without reading Yasunari Kawabata. Snow Country is his greatest hit, a beautiful novel that both reflected and shaped Japanese culture, but The Rainbow – translated into English for the first time – is Kawabata’s missing classic. The Rainbow is where modern Japan begins – a nation born again in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, and in its bitter-sweet tale of two sisters is also the story of a nation struggling to find a way to live in the rubble and ruins. As always with Japan’s greatest novelist, his themes – the bonds of family, wounds that will never heal , love that endures and loser boyfriends – are painfully universal. A book for anyone who loves Japan, or great story-telling, or both. Dazzling, brilliant, unmissable.

Tony Parsons

Kawabata’s novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time

The New York Times Book Review

Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible

Commonweal

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