A Kawabata novel that I have mixed feeling about. Unlike The Old Capital, this one has a more meandering plot and a vague, open ending that becomes Kawabata's signature's style. The plot revolves around Ogata Shingo's family, whose children were strayed: the son has an affair with a geisha, while the daughter has become estranged from her husband. These were the surface-layer issues, however, as we found out that beyond this, there were dissatisfaction and pent up frustrations that led to conflicting desires, threatening to tear the family apart.

That being said, none of these tumultuous relationship never shows its wreckage to the surface. In all but small parts of the book and perhaps the last few chapters, we only see the small glimpses, vignettes of family lives that seemingly idyllic and peaceful in first glance, but hide its fangs and bitterness in family members' offhand insults, sarcasms, and ignorance of others.

I found this to be one of the interesting part actually, what differentiates Kawabata (and other Japanese authors in general) to Western authors: while Western authors prefer to strike and to bring the conflict as open and as confrontational as possible, Japanese authors like Kawabata prefer to marinade in it, to not dive into the why and how, but to understand of what impact of the broken relationship to the wider, extended family, and what does it mean to one's existence?

Here, what we have is a meditation of what it means to be a parents: whether the success of one's parenthood is defined by one's child's ability to build a family own its own – or should we separate the adulthood of our children from our own?

Overall, a pretty enjoyable read, though I'd prefer to have deeper characterisations that can provide more nuance or serve as a tangible anchor for me to the story itself.