A Tokyo man's obsession with a geisha in a mountain hot-spring town, told in fragments of pure sensation. Kawabata's haiku-like compression distills everything the Nobel committee meant when it cited his mastery of "the essentials of the Japanese mind" in 1968. Beauty shot through with melancholy; impermanence as the condition of all feeling.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.