Thousand CranesThousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress' rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949, Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded.