Dandelions

The exquisite last novella by Nobel Prizewinner Yasunari Kawabata

In a dreamlike Japanese town on the banks of the Ikuta River, Ineko loses the ability to see certain things. It begins with a ping-pong ball and progresses to her fiance, whom she cannot see at all. The doctors call it somagnosia, and Ineko’s mother and her fiance place her in a psychiatric clinic to recover. As they walk home along the riverbank, they consider- is her condition really a form of madness? Is Ineko’s selective blindness an expression of her love? Are the trees around them weeping?

Delicate, strange and spare, this novella carries the art of the novel into tantalizing and mysterious new realms.