THE OLD CAPITAL<i> by Yasunari Kawabata (North Point Press: $8.95) </i>

This brief novel was one of the three works cited by the committee that awarded Yasunari Kawabata the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968. In restrained, elegiac prose, Kawabata blends the twin themes of the misunderstanding between people and the unity of humanity and nature that recur in his mature work. The growth of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a wholesale clothier, mirrors the changes the seasons bring to the forests near the old Imperial capital of Kyoto. At the beginning of the story, clusters of spring violets growing in the clefts of an old maple tree reflect her innocence. But as she discovers her true origins, she learns that her comfortable, middle-class life in the city has been scrupulously maintained to produce a beauty that is artificial and, therefore, weak, like the carefully pruned cedars that grow in the lumber farms of nearby Kitayama.