Snow Country (1935)

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. The novel began as a single short story published in a literary journal in January 1935. Kawabata continued writing about the characters afterward, with parts of the novel ultimately appearing in five different journals before he published the the book in whole. He continued working on the novel over a period of years. Finally, in 1948, the novel reached its final form as "Snow country", a literal translation of the Japanese title "Yukiguni". The name comes from the place where the story takes place, where Shimamura arrives in a train coming through a long tunnel under the border mountains between Gunma and Niigata Prefectures. Sitting at the foot of mountains, on the north side, this region receives a huge amount of snow in winter because of the northern winds coming across the Sea of Japan. The winds accumulate moisture over the sea and deposit it as snow while running up against the mountains. The snow reaches four to five meters in depths, sometimes isolating the towns and villages in the region from others. The lonely atmosphere suggested by the title is infused throughout the book.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, Kawabata's stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha takes place in the town of Yuzawa. The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral. The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, a wealthy loner who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed from the opening. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book. I thrilled at the dense simplicity and sadness of Kawabata's story. ( )

I'm a tidbit disappointed by this book, for some reason I expected more of it than I got out while reading. Think I was hoping for a book in the style of Autumn Brocade (by Teru Miyamoto or The Sound of Waves (by Yukio Mishima).
Apart from that is my brain not really into the guessing game and not so brialliant these days in picking up clues, so what I mainly have to say is that the brilliance and subtility of this book totally escaped me.
I disliked Shimamura profoundly and I was annoyed by Komako and that made it nearly impossible to like the book. What I did like though, were the descriptions of the surroundings, the weather.
I'm glad it came along and that I had a chance to try it, but I won't re-read it, not even in Dutch (if there is a translation). ( )

This is a story about a Tokyo snob who takes trips to the country to mess with the emotions of a young geisha. He is cold as the snow, and she is lonely and full of desire. The story is told from third-person limited from Shimamura’s (the Tokyo snob) perspective. The prose is poetic but has a few odd phrases. For example the following quote is supposed to be complimentary: “He describes her mouth as resembling a perfect circle of leeches--that the color is "wholesome" and that the skin is smooth.” I wondered if they really talked this way in Japan in 1956.

Even though the emotions of the characters are not explicitly stated, there is a heavy tension that is weaved throughout the story. We only get hints of this emotion during the dialogue and action. This appears to be typical of some Japanese writers and is very magical in a subtle way. The book ends in a strange fashion. It does have an ending, but it’s also left open for interpretation.
( )

My first Kawabata. Intense feelings in sparse words. ( )

Read any review of Snow Country and you will find people making comparisons to a haiku or to music. Kawabata's descriptions are like water, flowing easily from page to page, but indeed like water very powerful. The details of the story are like music, lilting and magical and sometimes, more often than not, sorrowful. The story itself is very stark. It's the relationship between a wealthy businessman and his snow country geisha. Their relationship is complicated by an imbalance of feelings. She cares for him more passionately then he does for her. In fact, his feelings are as cold as the winter countryside. It is frustrating at times to know they will never bridge the cultural or emotional gap...until you remember he is married. ( )