During the time that this book was written many people believed that becoming a modern, industrialized, country meant loneliness and detachment for the people of Japan, which is the main theme of the Snow Country. This theme of melancholy is portrayed through the love affair between an onsen geisha named Komako and a Japanese businessman named Shimamura. I believe that Komako and the snow country represents the old Japan, the one with traditional values such as Shintoism, Confucian hierarchy, and the traditional role of women. While Shimamura and technology represents the modern Japan because Shimamura is a business man, he rides a train to and from his home in Tokyo, and the use of telegraph systems in the snow country. Modern technology can also be seen as killing the old Japan because a movie projector burns down a silkworm cocoon storage barn and possibly kills one of the main characters.

Honestly, I kind of had a hard time with this book, even though it is a very easy read, only 192 pages. The storyline is very confusing and time will fast forward without much warning. I was also really disappointed with the ending, it is way to abrupt and has no sense of closure, I turned the last page and thought "really that's it?". Although in my history class we decided this was the author's way to take another jab at western culture because western books spelled everything out for the reader and he wanted his readers to think for themselves. Over time I did start to gain a soft spot for Komako even though she did come off as a bit crazy and an alcoholic, but I was unable to feel anything for Shimamura who was remained cold and detached throughout the whole book.

I would only recommend this book to people who already posses a knowledge about Japanese culture and history or posses an extreme love of Japan. I think one of the main reasons I was able to gain anything from this book is because it was assigned in a history of Japan class and I had the teacher for guidance. ( )

A lot of snow in this book, and a sad love affair. It takes place in Japan presumably in the 1930s in a remote mountain resort in the snowiest part of the islands, where snow can reach ten, eleven meters in winter, roads are blocked and train remains the only means of contact with the outside world. The main characters are: a relatively young, and relatively well off man, Shimamura, living off the money he doesn’t have to earn, who arrives there repeatedly from Tokyo and a local geisha, Kumako. There is another woman there, Yoko, who is a source of fascination for him and who weaves in and out of picture. There is also a wife in Tokyo, whom we never meet. There is sparseness of words and characterization, yet the conflicts are easily recognizable and relationships don’t lack depth.
The book is not straightforward and doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, but it’s very poetic with beautiful haiku like descriptions.
I read it in Polish when I was around twelve years old, much too young to understand the complicated emotions and relationships there, but old enough to remember the atmospheric beauty of it. ( )

This is said to be 1958 Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata's masterpiece. You can tell it's very good: some of the descriptive passages are sublime. But I clearly lack the cultural wherewithal to follow the central story of the relationship between Shimamura, a portly, married Japanese 1930s counterpart to the dilettantish protagonist of Nick Hornby's About a Boy, and a geisha (or perhaps she's an amateur, whatever that means) in the mountain resort he frequents. For example, even though the translator explicates it carefully in his introduction, I simply didn't get how Shimamura's saying to the geisha 'You're a good woman' can be characterised as a frivolous remark, still less precipitate the crisis it does. So far was I from comprehension that I wasn't sure if the narrative encompassed two love triangles, just one or none at all. There's another young woman who exerts a strange fascination over Shimamura whose meaning and function in the plot is completely opaque to me (she possibly attempts suicide at the end of the book, and I know I was supposed to read something between the lines about the significance for Shimamura of that act, but I couldn't see anything between the lines but blank paper). Shimamura's presumably long-suffering wife has only one line, in which she warns him not to let moths ruin his clothes when he goes to the geisha town. ( )

I really feel like I've been somewhere new with this novel, to a country and a culture I know very little about. Set in western Japan, apparently the snowiest region on earth, the story deals with a doomed love affair between a rich man from Tokyo and a young geisha in a remote mountain resort. (Mountain geishas, we're told in the translator's introduction, didn't enjoy the social status of their urban sisters, and were little more than prostitutes, which makes the relationship between Shimamura and Komako all the more poignant).
What really made this book for me was the style - the narrative is sparse, minimalist, even haiku-like at times, and the reader is left to infer changes of mood and shifts in the way the characters relate to each other through subtle imagery. Great importance is attached to the natural surroundings, and the changing seasons in the mountains reflect changes in the relationship between the two characters.
Edward G. Seidensticker's translation, first published in the 1950s, I think, is excellent.
I think this one will stay with me for a long, long time.

Kawabata's novels retain timeless appeal for their lyricism, his aesthetic discourse over beauty, and his characters' inner struggles with human longing. In his classic Yukiguni (Snow Country), he paints a story of a discontent city-dweller who finds solace in a maiden's simple beauty and sporadic love for her temporary guest, which are only magnified by the harshness of a cold countryside tinged with icicles and a closed society's wrath. In what some may call the Japanese fashion, Kawabata invites the reader to imagine great depths of human emotion without using so many words. ( )