Thousand Cranes (千羽鶴, Senbazuru) is a novel by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata which first appeared in serialised form between 1949 and 1951 and was published as a book in 1952.

[1][2] The novel consists of five chapters, titled "Thousand Cranes", "The Grove in the Evening Sun", "Figured Shino", "Her Mother's Lipstick" and "Double Star".

28-year-old Tokyo office worker Kikuji attends the tea ceremony lesson of Miss Chikako Kurimoto, with whom his deceased father once had a short-lived affair.

Kikuji is impressed by the beauty of one of Miss Kurimoto's pupils, Yukiko Inamura, who carries a furoshiki which bears a pattern of the thousand cranes of the novel's title.

In his 2015 review for The Japan Times, Stephen Mansfield pointed out the novel's "beautiful language, obsessive sexuality and contempt for the era", and the repeated juxtaposition of the "ugly and venal" with images of beauty, calling it "a work suffused with loneliness and disorientation at the failure of art, literature and even the tea ceremony to create a more ideal world".

[3] Boyd Tonkin in The Independent found "chaotic passions" at work behind "a lyrical and understated surface", with the rituals and vessels of the tea ceremony symbolically enacting "the guilt, grief and longing" of the protagonists.

For Pollack, the thoroughly negative portrayal of Miss Kurimoto is a sign of Kawabata's, and most male Japanese writers', antagonism to the idea of "a woman with 'masculine' interests and the willingness and ability to act on them".