Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Published 1949 · 174 pages · 28,152 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Thousand Cranes to read?
Thousand Cranes scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Japanese in translation.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Kawabata spare prose.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Desire, purity, ritual.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Tea ceremony.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Third person, indirect.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- Cranes, tea bowls, purity.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Aesthetic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Unresolved desire.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Episodic structure.
How Thousand Cranes is regarded
Thousand Cranes holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.