A married man goes to the mountains during spring deep in the snow country, the north western mountain region of Japan. He is an idler. Wealthy. A city man from Tokyo. Coming down from the mountains and into a inn he meets a geisha and his soul is stirred. And though he revisits the inn during the years that follow, both he and the geisha know that the relationship is but a wasted effort.

Kawabata takes a simple relationship between a man and a woman and melds it into their natural environment and seasonal setting. They become the snow that falls, the turning maple leaf, the isolated village, the shadowy mountains, and in the end... the milky way. Reading Kawabata is reading poetry in prose. He is not about complicated plot lines. His books are not, and should not, be 'page turners'. They should be read slowly, each line savored... only then might you feel what it's like for the entire Milky Way to roar into your being.

I was in Kyoto last week and visited Takayama and the mountains surrounding that area. I brought with me [Blood Meridian] for the brutal contrast of time and place. Back home, Kawabata came to mind and I picked this book up and scenes from the book echoed some of the places I saw and experienced. When travels and fiction meet, a sort of magic occurs.


From behind the rock, the cedars threw up their trunks in perfectly straight lines, so high that he could see the tops only by arching his back. The dark needles blocked out the sky, and the stillness seemed to be singing quietly.


The air in the earthen-floored hallway was still and cold. Shimamura was led up a ladder before his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. It was a ladder in the truest sense of the word, and the room at the top was an attic... although there was but one low window, opening to the south...


'Listen! The crows. That frightening way they sometimes have. Where are they, I wonder? And isn't it cold!' Komako hugged herself as she looked up at the sky.


Following a stream, the train came out on the plain. ( )

Nothing much happens in Snow Country except during the violent fire at the end. The solution to a central mystery of the novel--what intrigue does Yoko hold for the protagonist--is hinted at many times but never explained.

I think the method of the book is to layer descriptions of traditions, the atmosphere of a hot spring town, expressions of the seasons in transition, the protagonist's conversations with his lover, and his adoring, emotion imbued rendering of nature in order to, not so much understand his situation, but to feel it. He is a dilettante, an artist, a man weary of life yet peaked its strokes of vanishing startling beauty. When the fire, stars at night, and mortality jolt him awake, so to speak, there is a jarring contrast between nature's calm and the people with their traditions and the massiveness and the ferocity of nature.

I think the novel works up to this contrast and it works pretty well. However, if you read mostly for plot and want readily identifiable or even sharply drawn characters, I would skip this. Here the characters' inner lives are lightly drawn from suggestions from dialogue, or details and observations.

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. ( )

Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). This novel, translated into English in the 1950s, is about a rich Tokyo man who regularly leaves his wife and children and to go visit with a mountain geisha who loves him. Drama, drama. The language is calm and charming, but the story isn't very compelling. ( )

At heart, this is the story of a man from Tokyo and his romance with a woman who becomes a geisha in the mountains of northwestern Japan; Kawabata, I think, was talking about somewhere in Niigata when making his descriptions. Their relationship is fairly complicated, but it seems to have a big component of her knowing it can't work with someone as careless with feelings and free of time as Shimamura, the man involved. But somehow, she can't get away from him; her reactions are fairly interesting, going back and forth.

The plot really just is that; there's not much more beyond it. He comes to the village she lives in three different times, and that's the story. But for all that, it's still a pretty rich story. And I liked the style of the translation; I read it in English mostly because I had never read anything translated by Seidensticker before, and I felt like I should get a feel for his work. It flowed pretty well, and the parts that struck me as strange I think were in the original. (Really, wet, red lips like... leeches?)

Anyway, this was a good one, and I should try more Kawabata soon, I think. I already picked up a short story collection of his; maybe some time soon. ( )

Tout en subtilité ( )

The story of a geisha and one of her patrons, it is simply told, and quite tragic, though that remains beneath the surface. The recurrent theme is that of wasted beauty. The two protagonists represent two opposing views of the world - existentialism and nihilism, if you want to force a western viewpoint. This examination of philosophy is dealt with quite subtly, though, and I feel like I am doing it a disservice, almost, by stating it so baldly. In my view, the translation leaves something to be desired (though it turns out that the translator has won awards for his work!). ( )