In August 1923, a month before the Great Kanto Earthquake, the poet Kanoko Okamoto stayed at the Hiranoya ryokan (now Hotel New Kamakura) to spend the summer with her unique family. There he meets Ryunosuke Akutagawa. After the eventful encounter, Kanoko will discover the drama that the famous writer drags and that would lead him to suicide just four years later.
That sad memory was revealed to the world in this work, an autofiction that narrates with heartbreaking passion the singular connection between a poet and a famous writer before her painful sunset.
The suffering crane is the debut work of one of the most unique writers of Japanese literature and, without doubt, one of the most controversial. This novel explores, in a masterful way, many of the themes that made the Japanese society of the early twentieth century falter, such as Westernization, suicide or feminism...read more
