“The fathers ate sour grapes, but the teeth of the children are set on edge” is a biblical quote that surprisingly accurately conveys the “top”, “plot” layer of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel “The Thousand-Winged Crane.” The story is about a nervous, reflective young man Kikuji, for whom one of his late father’s mistresses is obsessively trying to replace his mother and marry his bride, the other for some reason starts an affair with him, and he falls in love with her daughter, who, in turn, has complex and ambiguous feelings for him. feelings, performed by a Western author would have smacked of comedy, but Kawabata was Japanese, and therefore his novel, imbued with national symbolism (in which the cross-cutting images of the crane and the tea ceremony are only the most obvious) and numerous allusions and references to the masterpieces of the Heian and samurai eras, was and remains one of the most brilliant, aristocratically refined and controversial works of the last century.