Yasunari Kawabata's slim novel  'Beauty and Sadness'  is both of these things, from the opening scene in a near empty  first class train carriage with its swivel seats idly turning, expensive luggage left unattended, the feeling of being a passenger in an elegant and profound tragedy grows. The sense of  transitory beauty, haunted and fatalistic is established through carefully observed details, when the young artist Keiko straightens the back seam of her lover and mentor's kimono, it is likely a shiver will run up your spine, even though you won't know why.

While everyone in this novel  has impeccable manners, and the aesthetics are exquisite, the story opens into a disconcertingly moral morass. Kawabata in writing so neutrally about the moral failure of the Oki, the novelist and a principal character, makes a biting statement about how corruption can be glossed over by proper manners and a due regard for beauty.

Published first in Japanese in 1964  some eight years before Kawabata's suicide in 1972, the author's preoccupation with beauty and the beauty of death gives us a cinematic novel that echoes, like the Kyoto New Year bells' , long after midnight.

Footnote: While we are largely at home, I will write these short asides on what I am reading, just in case my blog followers are need reading inspiration.