The renowned Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize in literature. His novella Senbazuru has come to us in Kannada by way of its English version, Thousand Cranes.

About the Kannada version titled Savira Pakshigalu, the famous writer Dr. N. S. Lakashiminarayana Bhatta says the following: Despite being a short novella, “Savira Pakshigalu” is a wonderful piece of writing. It is simple and eminently readable, encompassing all elements of a beautiful, long narrative poem. The story is about a romantic relationships between a man and a woman, but it flows beyond all preconceived expectations. The language is profound, yet intimate. With this translation, Dr. T. N. Krishna Raju, a writer well known to Kannada-speaking people, has made an invaluable contribution to the Kannada literature.” 

"T. N. Krishnaraju has the ability to penetrate deep into the seemingly ordinary events of life and reflect on them profoundly. He analyzes the complexities of human relationships with kindness and sensitivity. He has the rare ability to convey to our senses directly without wasting mere words. He has an immensely reassuring, optimistic vision for mankind…" S. Divakara.

"…[reading Krishnaraju's stories] made me appreciate that when an author expresses his most intense experiences slowly with patience, the space between poetry and prose vanishes…"  B.T. Shridhara Sharma

“…[even while] relaxing on a reclining sofa, watching Lake Michigan and imbibing red wine,  he can taste the buttermilk-soup and lentil sambar his mother used to cook, he would dream the Chariot procession of Krishna in Udupi, and the fifth-day snake festival…' laced with delightful humor, Krishnaraju's writings convey the feeling that he never takes himself too seriously…" Giri

“This book is an English translation of Ramanujan's three books of poems and a novella. The books of poems—NoLotus in the Naval, And Other Poems, and Kuntobille—are written in an extraordinary variety of modes and moods. Ramanujan, the poet, roams freely and widely in Kannada, the language of his childhood. He quarrels with himself, with his traditional roots, and his adopted country—the United States, giving us memorable poems such as, Oh Lord, Whether you Exist; A King of Soliloquies, and The River.

The prose work, Someone Else's Autobiography, is an unusually complex story told by the fictional K. K. Ramanujan to A.K. Ramanujan. Though the crisis of consciousness depicted in the novella is thoroughly modern, the author has chosen a traditional Indian mode of telling it.

Ramanujan was an Indian poet, scholar, and author, a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

He was called "Indo-Anglian harbingers of literary modernism". Several disciplinary areas are enriched with A. K. Ramanujan's aesthetic and theoretical contributions. His free-thinking context and his individuality, which he attributes to Euro-American culture, give rise to the "universal testaments of law". A classical kind of context-sensitive theme is also found in his cultural essays, especially in his writings about Indian folklore and classic poetry. He worked on non-Sanskritic Indian literature, and his popular work in sociolinguistics and literature unfolds his creativity in the most striking way. English Poetry most popularly knows him for his avant-garde approach.

This book is co-translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels-Ramanujan. This book was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.” Goodreads

“It's astonishing how much these poems sound like Ramanujan's Anglophone poetry: the translators have done an excellent job. The novella manages to be sad and uplifting. You can find life, death, family drama, multilingualism, and all manner of fluids. I wish it were longer. The narrator's sexual awakening is tied to one special tree, true, but I find even hotter his description of a bathing Sikh.” –Anonymous reader