Thousand Cranes: A novel placid on the surface but teeming with passion beneath

Yasunari Kawabata's novel from the 1940s (I think; it was translated into English in the 1950s, and the volume I'm reading is amazingly unhelpful re original pub date) Thousand Cranes is on the surface a subtle, placid narrative that focuses on the Japanese tea ceremony: Could anything be less marketable or more alien to most non-Japanese readers? The ceremony, of which there are several over at least the first half of this short novel, involves many subtleties of decorum, decor, and behavior, all of which are deeply meaningful to the participants but completely obscure to most contemporary readers: the kind of bowl in which the tea is served, the protocol of giving a bowl as a gift, the type of tea, the seating, who pours the tea and when, the condition of the tea garden (or screened porch, it seems), the wall hangings, and so forth. But - beneath this subtle and obscure surface narrative there's quite a steamy plot "brewing," which teems with a soap-opera dosage of sexual rivalry, jealousy, attraction and repulsion, Oedipal urges, generational rivalry, courtship, guilt, and suicide, whew! As a brief summary (and I'm sorry that I can't recall the precise names of most characters), a young man (Kikuji) is invited to a tea ceremony at the home of a woman who was, briefly, his father's mistress and who has always repulsed him largely because of a birthmark on her breast; he knows that at this ceremony the woman is trying to introduce him to a potential match; he is annoyed at her forthrightness - he wants nothing to do w/ this woman who repulses him - but she's forward and, as it happens, the young man is attracted to the potential match (a young woman wearing a pink scarf adorned with the pattern of "thousand cranes"). But there's another group at the ceremony (the woman is an expert at tea ceremony and even gives lessons; oddly, the tea ceremony is actually considered a hobby), a mother (Mrs. Ota) and adult daughter - and the mother had also been the mistress of the man's father. Following the ceremony, he escorts the mother home, which leads to a night together and sexual relationships (she's 45 and he seems to be mid-20s); eventually, her guilt and her shame - especially because he never follows up - leads to the woman's suicide, and thus begins a series of discussions between the young man and the bereft daughter. Like the ceremony itself, novel is strange and ritualized, devoid of histrionics, but the calm surface covers deep and strange feelings and a complex network of inter-relationships. I would guess this novel has been adapted for film - probably a good one.