"Thousand Cranes" by Yasunari Kawabata ****

• Japanese author 
• Originally published in 1958
• Nobel Prize winning author
• Review:  There is a unique rhythm to the prose in a Japanese novel which I enjoy tremendously.  This novella is a tale of the inextricable ties that bind the dead and the living.  A young man's father dies and yet the tangled web of his life continues to entangle the son.  The story revolves around the ancient rite of the tea ceremony with a focus on the vessels created by early masters.  Kawabata seems to reveal the ties from ancient times carried forward, in both tea ware and relationships.