1000 Cranes

 I have re-read 1000 Cranes, by Kawabata.  A man of 25 is invited to miai, a step in an arranged marriage. But he doesn't know it is a miai, and the woman who arranged it an ex-lover of his dead father. Also there is yet another lover of his father. He goes home with the second lover, and has sex with her. Then, the rest of the novel is about how the shadow of these two women make it impossible for him to go through the marriage to the original woman at the miai, or with the daughter of the woman he has slept with.  He feels sullied by the intergenerational effect, which gets in the way of his affection for either of the younger women, especially the daughter of lover #2, who also was around his own father quite a bit.  

The story is told through details of the tea ceremony, and objects associated with drinking tea. The daughter gives her a tea cup that belonged to her mother, a tea cup with a permanent lipstick stain on it.  

Once again, the culturally specific parts of it seem inaccessible, but yet symbolically transparent, in the sense that this is the vehicle for the plot to take place, not the place where meaning is invested.