'The Rainbow' by Yasunari Kawabata

13 October 2026

I am very grateful to Geoff Crossick for giving me a copy of another classic Japanese novel, 'The Rainbow' by Yasunari Kawabata, originally published in 1951 and translated into English by Haydn Trowell in 2023. This is a very different book to 'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kōbō Abe (also reviewed here in October 2026). Compared to that 1960s surreal existential novel 'The Rainbow', written a decade earlier, feels like a more conventional narrative. But it's an equally fascinating insight into Japanese history and culture. 'The Rainbow' was written and set in a Japan coming to terms with the aftermath of World War II and has the eerie feeling of a country that is on the cusp between two very different worlds. This is the story of a middle-aged professional man - an architect - who is the father of three daughters by three different mothers. In some ways this is a gentle, ambling tale of the two oldest daughters wanting and not wanting to meet their younger stepsister for the first time. While the novel is straightforwardly realistic, without any elements of magic realism or dreamlike narrative, there is still a strange ennui to the plot. The characters spend a lot of the book visiting villas and palaces built for members of the Japanese nobility who had been stripped of their wealth and privileges after the war. With the public now able to see inside these grand houses for the first time it feels like the Japanese people are tourists walking through their country's history. The novel's plot manages to be both a slow, gentle examination of family relationships in which nothing much seems to be happening, and simultaneously a bizarre series of melodramatic events including infidelity, unplanned pregnancy and suicide. When I first started listening to 'world music' and attending the annual WOMAD Festival, in the early 2000s, I was driven by a frustration with what felt like the increasing banality and predictability of mainstream pop music. I loved discovering music, from around the world, that didn't follow the familiar patterns I was used to and still had the potential to surprise me. I've enjoyed reading Japanese novels for similar reasons, precisely because I find it hard to see where the plot is going. It's also fascinating to learn more about Japanese culture and traditions through fiction. 'The Rainbow' is full of traditional tea ceremonies and the size of rooms in houses is routinely measured by the number of tatami mats that would fit on the floor. ("In the six-mat pavilion, there was a four-and-a-half-mat room used for the tea ceremony ...") 'The Rainbow' is quite a melancholic, reflective story showing a country coming to terms with itself through the microcosm of a single family.