The Old Capital

The Old Capital is one of the three works for which Yasunari Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Set in Kyoto — the old capital of Japan for a thousand years — this lyric novel traces the life of Chieko, the beloved adopted daughter of a kimono designer and his wife. Believing that she had been kidnapped by the couple as a baby, Chieko learns one day that she was instead a foundling, left abandoned on a doorstep.

Happy with her adopted parents, however, her security and contentment remain undisturbed until an answered prayer at the famous Yasaka Shrine dramatically alters the course of her life.

'Kawabata’s novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time.' — Ivan Morris

'Yasunari Kawabata...weaves in countless quintessentially Japanese motifs, from the Bamboo Cutting Ceremony and the Imperial Offering of Cucumbers. Suddenly, though, in the middle of all this, a Sony radio starts to chatter, and the story’s elegiac, and prophetic, depth is doubled.' — The New Yorker