Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Lake by Yasunari Kawabata

Blurb from Goodreads

This story of a stalker is a unique work by the first Japanese Nobel Prize winner for Literature.

The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man’s sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream–the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is “an angel’s,” the figures of two students he follows seem to “glide over the green grass that hid their knees.” Reality is the durable ugliness that is his constant companion and is symbolized in the grotesque deformity of the hero’s feet. And it is the irreconcilable nature of these worlds that explains the strangely dehumanized, shadowy quality of the eroticism that pervades this novel.

In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a “happening,” making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata’s works. Just as the hero’s interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry. 

Why I Want To Read It

And just like that, we’re on the last Monday and, consequently, the last week of February. Whilst it is the last week of February, it also means that a new month is slowly being ushered by earth’s evolution. Aside from the typical financial reporting brouhaha, life has been pretty stable. In this most uncertain of times, stable and safe is a better alternative.

Mondays also mean Goodreads Monday updates. For this week’s update, I am featuring Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s The Lake. First off, let me just state the obvious: I am a fan of Japanese literature. It is a vast literary genre that branches fruther out to more genres and subgenres. In this vast landscape, Yasunari Kawabata is one of the distinct voices that further reels me in. Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, taking home the plum in 1968. He was also one of the first Japanese writers to capture my attention.

However, it has been nearly three years since I read any of his works; the last I read was Thousand Cranes which I read in 2017. I think it is just the right time to immerse in his body of work yet again. I recently bought my copy of The Lake but I am looking at including it in my 2021 reading list which is already growing at the seams (HAHA). I guess I just have too many books to choose from.

How about you fellow reader, what book do you want to read? I hope you can share it in the comment box. For now, happy reading! Have a great week ahead!