A Woman's Dream

Name: A Woman's Dream
ISBN: 9787573605009

Kawabata Yasunari / 魏大海Qingdao Publishing House · ChinaFeb 2023

3.9

Word count: 117K words
Chapters: 27
ISBN: 9787573605009

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Summary

36-year-old dentist Kenichi Kuhara, long single, marries the beautiful Haruko after an arranged meeting and settles into a happy life. He learns that his 27-year-old wife has a cousin who killed himself after a love went unrequited, but thinks nothing of it. On the second night after the wedding, Haruko is overcome with guilt after dreaming of her dead cousin. With the help of a doctor friend, Kuhara looks into the cousin's pre-existing neurasthenia and sets Haruko's mind at ease. Yet the precious memories and heaven-sent blessings that seemed to belong to Haruko gradually slip away.

Editor's review

A collection of short stories published by Yasunari Kawabata in 1961, Women's Dreams comprises six works: "Women's Dreams," "White Flowers," "Cloth Scraps," "Makeup," "The Beauty Under the Moon," and "Autumn Rain." Written in the author's mature period, these pieces continue his characteristic delicate, sorrowful aesthetic while revealing a more introspective and restrained narrative quality. This is not a plot-driven popular novel but a work that probes the subtle inner world of women, using dreams, memories, and fleeting sensory impressions as vehicles to explore such eternal themes as desire, solitude, the passage of time, and the illusion of life and death. With his distinctive "Neo-Sensualist" technique, Kawabata transforms visual, auditory, and olfactory experiences into exquisite verbal images, constructing a hazy, beautiful, and faintly lonely artistic world. Readers can deeply appreciate the essence of the Japanese aesthetics of mono no aware and yūgen. For lovers of literature, this work is an important text for understanding Kawabata's late creative style and intellectual evolution; its distilled language and highly imagistic expression also offer great value to writers.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Deep readers with a strong interest in Japanese literature and Kawabata's works
Readers eager to explore the complex emotions and inner world of women through literature
Lovers of literature who appreciate a restrained, distilled style rich in imagery and suggestion
Readers accustomed to reflecting on philosophical questions of existence, solitude, time, and memory

Not a good fit for

Readers of popular fiction seeking strong plots, fast pacing, and clear resolutions
Readers who do not respond to the traditional Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware and introspective psychological depiction

Reading tips

Read in a quiet setting and immerse yourself, savoring the subtle shifts of emotion and sensory description
Try treating each story as an independent spiritual tableau; do not rush to seek a continuous plot—focus on the overall atmosphere and mood
After reading, pause to reflect on the images of dreams, flowers, rain, and mirrors, and consider their deeper connection to the characters' states of mind and the themes

About the publisher

Qingdao Publishing House China · Founded in 1987

Founded in 1987, Qingdao Publishing House has long focused on education, science and technology, children's books, and lifestyle titles, while steadily publishing classical and foreign literature. Its 827 titles in the catalog reflect a balance between making classics widely accessible and serving young readers. They include the four great classics of Chinese literature—Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Journey to the West—as well as foreign literary translations such as Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book, works associated with Zhou Zuoren, and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. The press also offers a color-illustrated series of recommended classics for primary and secondary school Chinese curriculum reading, using pictures and text to support student readers. Its common categories cover classical literature, essays and miscellaneous writings, folk literature, and foreign literature, with authors including Luo Guanzhong, Shi Nai'an, Cao Xueqin, Gao E, Wu Cheng'en, Sei Shōnagon, Zhou Zuoren, and Victor Hugo. Public information is limited, so this profile emphasizes the publishing directions shown by the catalog.

版权信息
译序
少年
一
二
三
四
五
六
七
八
九
十
十一
十二
十三
十四
十五
十六
十七
十六岁的日记
招魂祭一景
禽兽
女人的梦
重逢
水月
离合

FAQ

How does this book differ in style from Kawabata's better-known works such as Snow Country and The Old Capital?

Compared with mid-career masterpieces like Snow Country, the stories collected in Women's Dreams are more distilled, inward, and abstract. They reduce full narrative exposition and focus more on capturing momentary psychological impressions and the world of the senses; the interweaving of dream and reality is more prominent, reflecting the purer spiritual exploration and formal experimentation of the author's late period.

What exactly do the 'women's dreams' in the book refer to?

The 'dream' is a central image in Kawabata's writing. It refers not merely to visions in sleep but symbolizes the repressed desires deep in the female characters' hearts, their remembrance of time past, their longing for unattainable love, and the hazy borderland between reality and ideal. It is a hidden window into the characters' subconscious and true feelings.

What are the features of this Qingdao Publishing House edition?

This Qingdao Publishing House edition belongs to its series of distinguished Japanese literary authors, and the translation strives to stay close to the elegant, understated style of Kawabata's original. The book may include a brief introduction or translator's afterword to help readers understand the background and literary value of the work, making it a reliable Chinese-language edition for encountering this relatively lesser-known Kawabata work.

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About the author

Kawabata Yasunari Author · Japan · 1899–1972

Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist and a leading figure of the New Sensationist school, born in Osaka. A prolific writer, he is represented on this site by 147 works, spanning essays and miscellaneous prose as well as foreign literature. His representative works include The Izu Dancer, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital; Snow Country in particular exists in multiple editions and translations, a sign of its wide circulation. Kawabata is known for his delicate prose, which interweaves human emotion with natural scenery to express the spiritual character of the Japanese people, and often conveys a sense of the beauty of impermanence in life and death. In 1968 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, an important landmark in the global recognition of Japanese literature; he died in 1972. Beyond his novels, his essays and miscellaneous writings also deserve attention.

魏大海 Author

Wei Dahai is a scholar-translator of Japanese literature whose name frequently appears as the translator of foreign-literature titles. Public information about him is limited: his dates, birthplace, and educational background are not clearly documented. Judging from the sixteen works held in the collection, however, the focus of his work is clear. He has devoted himself to translating modern and contemporary Japanese fiction, especially the representative works of Yasunari Kawabata and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The former includes Snow Country, The Old Capital, The Sound of the Mountain, House of the Sleeping Beauties, The Master of Go, and a ten-volume collection of Kawabata's novels; the latter includes Rashomon and Hell Screen and The Akutagawa Gateway and In a Grove. These translations are aimed at general readers and seek to capture both the lyrical and the austere qualities of the originals, balancing Kawabata's delicate melancholy against Akutagawa's terse intensity. For Chinese readers, Wei Dahai's translations are a familiar route into classic modern Japanese literature and are widely read in both casual reading and teaching contexts.