"Your mother was such a gentle person. I always feel when I see someone like her that I’m watching the last flowers fall. This is no world for gentle people."

Thousand Cranes is not Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s best-known novel, but it is astonishingly graceful – "so simple, so unadorned, and yet so aching". It contains all the writer’s hallmarks: beautiful language, obsessive sexuality and contempt for the era, says Stephen Mansfield in The Japan Times.

Set in post-war Japan, it follows the story of Kikuji who returns to the house of his dead father to attend a tea ceremony conducted by one of his father’s mistresses, Chikako. His only association with her is the large mole between her breasts that he had witnessed as a child, and which continues to haunt him as something both evil and erotic.

There he also meets Mrs Ota, another former mistress of his father’s, and with whom he reluctantly has a passionate affair. But ultimately it is her daughter that he comes to love. The young man and woman, both stifled by the ghosts of their parents, try to break out of their common past.

Subtle metaphors run through the course of this ancient tale – the Japanese tea ceremony itself being the most powerful, imbued with hidden meanings. The bowls and other finely crafted utensils that grace the ceremony outlive the human life and are ultimately handed down from one generation to the next, similar to the way in which the women from Kikuji’s father’s past make way into his own life.

"Thus, a tea bowl," recalls Mansfield, "owned by the husband of Kikuji’s father’s second mistress, passes into the hands of another former lover, who selects it to serve the son, and in the process the bowl becomes, at least symbolically, a poisoned chalice."

Published in Japanese in 1952. Translated into English by Edward G Seidensticker, published in 1964.