AS IN PREVIOUS works, Kawabata creates here an entire symbolic world through the use of colors. The painting that had brought Oki to visit Otoko was of a red flower.

...larger than life, with few leaves and a single white bud low on the stem. In that unnaturally large flower he saw Otoko's pride and nobility.

When Keiko presents him with one of her paintings, it is of a plum blossom "as large as a baby's face," mixing the colors red and white:

Whether you thought of the picture as cold or warm, the plum blossom throbbed with the youthful emotions of the painter. Probably Keiko had painted it just for him...

This mingling of passion and cool detachment completely infuses both Oki's love for Otoko, and its later reverberations.

Kawabata casts the novel in his familiar impressionistic style. The action drifts smoothly, almost dreamily: the actual time span of the novel is only half a year, but past events are called and accumulated until the story finally assumes a completely timeless quality.

In one of his frequent digressions, Kawabata seems to remark on his own structural style:

Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows the same for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

Due to Kawabata's lightness of touch, Beauty and Sadness may appear on casual reading to be rather slight. Yet it is perhaps the most elegantly constructed of Kawabata's novels. Like all of his works, it needs to be relished by the reader slowly, more like poetry than prose: associations must be given time to form, small details must be carefully absorbed. Kawabata was a master lyricist and a great writer about love; behind the misty outlines of his style one is bound to find a solid artistic core.