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Incredibly interesting portrait of a writer grappling with the tentacles the strains of European Modernism some forty years prior to receiving the Nobel. Asakusa-- thick throngs of Japanese street life painted vividly, as if caught precisely at the moment 1929 changes to 1930, in dancingly animated chapters of brevity the product of its serialized nighttime newspaper format. Lively, wonderful, cunning, and magical-- Asakusa in Kawabata's hand becomes Paris in the twenties stuffed into America during the destitute thirties.

Rereading, 20-23 March, 2021
Visceral experience, this strange novel, quite curiously a profound contrast with the later work for which he was awarded the Nobel. Kawabata’s Asakusa sprawls vividly alive. At each moment its colorful exuberance squirms, laughs, and teases. Exciting, inventive, playful, and dynamic� a joy, a pleasure, an enigmatic grin.