Snow Country

By Yasunari Kawabata and Edward G. Seidensticker

This masterpiece from the Nobel Prize-winning author and acclaimed writer of Thousand Cranes is a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. • “Kawabata’s novels are among the most affecting and original works of our time.” —The New York Times Book Review

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages—a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307833624

Reviews for Snow Country

[kakadoo202 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Atmospheric. Bizarre. But yet interesting

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As I read this book I couldn't help reflecting on the large gap between Eastern and Western cultures. Or at least there was at the time this book was written which was (mostly) prior to World War II. Westerners really don't have an equivalent to the geisha; perhaps the French with their mistresses come close but the geisha is not committed to one man. The geisha is supposed to be artistic as well as beautiful. She chooses who she will spend her time with and what she will do with that person. Even after reading this book I don't think I truly understand the reason women became geishas but it gave me a bit more of a glimpse of their life. This novel is set in a mountain valley quite far from Tokyo which gets abundant snow in the winter time. People (well men mostly) come here to spend time hiking, skiing, partying and taking baths in the hot springs. Shimamura is a wealthy dilettante who comes periodically to the valley and spends time with Komako. She was not a geisha when they first met but by the second visit she had become one. Komako tells Shimamura that she became a geisha in order to pay the medical bills of the son of a music teacher with whom she lived. She denies that the young man was her fiance but Shimamura has heard she was. She certainly seems to be unattached to him; a young woman named Yoko spends far more time with him and after his death she visits his grave every day. It is hard to say exactly what Shimamura and Komako feel for each other. Shimamura says when he was away from her he thought of Komako all the time but now that he is in the valley he seems to be interested in Yoko more than Komako. And while Komako spends a lot of time with Shimamura she also, on occasions, refuses to stay with him. It's a very complicated life for all the characters. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature and the jury mentioned Snow Country explicitly in their citation. The writing is exquisite but understated much like a haiku. The introduction (written by someone only denoted by the intials E.G.S.) alludes to this saying "The haiku manner presents a great challenge to the novelist. The manner is notable for its terseness and austerity, so that his novel must rather be like a series of brief flashes in a void. In Snow Country Kawabata has chosen a theme that makes a meeting between haiku and the novel possible." It was an interesting book but I'm not going to be rushing out to find other novels by Kawabata.

[pzr-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read Kawabata's 'The Master of Go' and rather enjoyed it. This short novel I admired rather than enjoyed. In theory, I should have loved it as it contained all the right ingredients - doomed love story, poetic prose, anti-heroic characters, evocative setting, etc. - but I found it took me a long time to read for such a short book. I think that the main problem was that I just couldn't engage with the male protagonist, a privileged, duplicitous and frankly irritating waster. Maybe I need to read it again.

This star system is problematic. I'm sure that this novella is worth more than three stars but having awarded four to 'The Master of Go', I had no place left to go but three. Perhaps I should stop awarding stars!

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Snow country has a complex writing history - Kawabata tinkered with it over a lengthy period from 1935 onwards, publishing bits of the story in a least five different journals in the process. It didn't appear as a complete book in its present form until 1948. (Kawabata returned to it once more at the end of his life, reworking it as one of his "palm-of-the-hand" micro-stories.) The book relates a series of visits by an urban dilettante, Shimamura, to an obscure mountain hot-springs resort in the west of Honshu. As Seidensticker delicately explains: "The Japanese seldom goes to a hot spring for his health, and he never goes for 'the season,' as people once went to Bath or Saratoga. He may ski or view maple leaves or cherry blossoms, but his wife is usually not with him. The special delights of the hot spring are for the unaccompanied gentleman. No prosperous hot spring is without its geisha and its compliant hotel maids." Shimamura, true to type, has left his wife and child in Tokyo (they are mentioned a couple of times in the book, but we never get to meet them) and orders up a geisha. It turns out to be a busy time, and what he gets is Komako, who when they first meet is a kind of semi-professional, "a girl who was not a geisha but who was sometimes asked to help at large parties". Shimamura is captivated by her aura of old-fashioned Japanese virtue and cleanness - "The impression the woman gave was a wonderfully clean and fresh one. It seemed to Shimamura that she must be clean to the hollows under her toes" - and starts to fall in love with his image of Komako as a simple country girl at the same time as he is physically attracted and aesthetically repelled by her occupation. The story is complicated by Shimamura's glimpses of another young woman, Yoko, whom he also instantly idealises, especially when he discovers she is in mourning for her lost lover. Kawabata keeps feeding us little bits of description that echo Shimamura's erotic confusion: on the one side the beauty of nature and the changing seasons; on the other the hardships of life under the snow for the local people, the economic uncertainties of tourism, traditional crafts and the geisha profession. Even the insects are made to remind us that they only have the briefest of spells of being beautiful before their lives end. This may be a geisha romance, but it's a distinctly unromantic one.

[judtheobscure · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although the language and imagery are hauntingly beautiful, I just could not sympathise with either shimamura's aesthetic coldness nor komako's inexplicable emotional outbursts. Too much of the aestheticising male gaze and not enough humanity or even dimension to the characters. This one, unfortunately, just left me cold.

[katherinegregg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Set in western Japan, Snow Country is the story of a troubled relationship between Shimamura, a businessman from Tokyo, and Komako, a local geisha from snow country. Shimamura visits the hot springs a couple of times a year where he spends time with Komako. Although Komako keeps herself busy making the rounds to parties, she has genuine feelings for Shimamura and expects more than he can give. Shimamura has a wife and children back home and remains for the most part detached from his encounters with Komako but fascinated by Yoko, a young woman he sees in the hot springs. The setting is cold and desolate and I felt sorry that Komako was wasting her youth and beauty in such a far away place waiting for visitors to come and go.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful prose but I didn't understand it one bit!

[gbsallery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cold. Japanese. Impenetrable. Haunting.

[rise_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Set in the perennially snow-cold region of western mainland of Japan, Snow Country features one of the coldest characters in fiction. Shimamura is a wealthy Tokyo-based gentlemen who from time to time visits a mountain hot spring and his geisha lover Komako. He appreciates the beauty of nature and culture (music and the art of Chijimi weaving), but his carefree aristocratic attitude cannot conceal his insensitivity to other people’s emotions. However much Komako expressed her deep feelings for him, Shimamura does not reciprocate. As the story progresses, Shimamura’s snow-like passivity and Komako’s fiery love intensify. The novel is an evocation of “inexpressible beauty” and passionate human nature. This is achieved through an ecological aesthetic that relies on a powerful sense of place and culture. Kawabata describes landscapes and gestures with the pithy ruthlessness of a haiku poet, imbuing words with lyricism and care. The insidious cold is effectively evoked through the inhabitants’ clothes (mountain trousers), skin (reddened and cracked), and comportment. Details are integrated to the setting. Cultural values are woven into the fabric of prose.   It was clear, from the familiar way she had talked to the station master the evening before and from the way she wore “mountain trousers,” that she was a native of this snow country, but the bold pattern of her obi, half visible over the trousers, made the rough russet and black stripes of the latter seem fresh and cheerful, and for the same reason the long sleeves of her woolen kimono took on a certain voluptuous charm. The trousers, split just below the knees, filled out toward the hips, and the heavy cotton, for all its natural stiffness, was somehow supple and gentle.Culture and arts seem to embody the harsh cold environment. As with his later novel The Old Capital, Kawabata appears to be delineating the relationships between man and woman and nature. Harmony with nature is the desirable objective; love is most desired. The way the samisen string instrument sounds, the powerful way of playing it, can be dictated by a clear sky over snow.“The tone is different on a day like this.” The tone had been as rich and vibrant as her remark suggested. The air was different. There were no theater walls, there was no audience, there was none of the city dust. The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.   Practicing alone, not aware herself of what was happening, perhaps, but with all the wideness of nature in this mountain valley for her companion, she had come quite as a part of nature to take on this special power. Her very loneliness beat down sorrow and fostered a wild strength of will.Kawabata’s writing is a delicate balance between expressing overwhelming beauty and containing it. The novel suggests that both the purity of art and the ability to master one's self can be derived from and conditioned by nature. One's destructive feelings, however, get in the way of fully achieving the harmony between human beings and nature. Although Shimamura's coldness does not hinder him from appreciating the traditional arts of weaving and samisen music playing, his disengagement from other people and his shallow intellectual curiosity are probably sufficient causes for his "estrangement" from nature. In this novel in which the souls of the characters seem to be blanketed in snow, love is unrequited. “Do you understand how I feel? ... If you understand, then tell me. Tell me, if you see how I feel”, Komako at one point implores Shimamura. The question reveals the hard-to-bridge gulf between two different persons.

[labfs39 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Yasunari Kawabata's early life was marked by loss. He was born in 1899 and orphaned as a toddler. He was taken in by his grandparents, but his grandmother died when he was seven and his grandfather when he was fifteen. His only sister died when he was ten. These early losses were compounded by rejection by his first love after she was raped by a monk. Kawabata became well-respected for his short stories while still in college and with other young writers started a literary movement called "Shinkankakuha," with the meaning of "new impressions or sensations." [Snow Country] was written in installments between 1934 and 1937 and is considered one of his best works. In 1968 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese person to do so. Four years later, he died by gassing, probably suicide, in the wake of his friend and fellow writer Mishima's own suicide. Snow Country refers to the area west of the central mountains where there is heavy snowfall, in excess of fifteen feet at times. The area is also known for it's hot springs and hot spring geishas. In his informative introduction, the translator, Seidensticker, writes that at the time men would travel to the snow country to ski or see the leaves or cherry blossoms, but without their wives and families. The hot spring geishas were provincial and little better than prostitutes, as opposed to their urban counterparts. In this short novel, the emotionally stunted dilettante, Shimamura, seduces a young girl without family, then returns two more times over the course of three years. The girl, Komako, is initially described as clean and pure, but inevitably becomes a geisha and begins to decay. Unable to love, Shimamura, can only admire women then move on, both literally and figuratively. Komako, meanwhile, is rooted to the place by her obligations and burdens. Shimamura is not devoid of self-awareness and the descriptions of him are both beautiful and ugly. He is wealthy enough not to need to work, but amuses himself by publishing articles about western ballet, despite never having seen one himself.He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. Off on a trip, he saw no need to hurry himself.He spent much of his time watching insects in their death agonies.The moths that litter his room on his last visit are symbolic of the decay that surrounds him and his own degenerate state.As he picked up a dead insect to throw it out, he sometimes thought for an instant of the children he had left in Tokyo.Yet he is also moved by their dead beauty and loneliness.Although short, this novel needs reflective reading. Much like poetry, it's the images that drive the story forward, not necessarily the plot. On the train, Shimamura spends hours looking at the reflections created by the light from inside the carriage on the window. Although the nature outside is still visible, another surreal world is superimposed, and creates the sort of hazy reality that appeals to him. He falls in love with a woman's face he can barely make out. Another similarity with poetry, particularly haiku, is Kawabata's use of opposing images in juxtaposition to reflect beauty. For instance, Black though the mountains were, they seemed at that moment brilliant with the color of snow.The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily.Black but brilliant with color and snow burning icily are but two of the many such descriptions that I savored. Quiet, understated, gem-like, all words I could use to describe Kawabata's writing. I have a collection of his short stories, [Palm-of-the-Hand Stories], and I look forward to more of the same.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Plot wise I wasn't a big fan of this book. I did like the writing and description of Japan. Unlike some things, this doesn't focus on Tokyo. It focused on Yuzawa, Niigata (which is a little north of Tokyo). I keep forgetting Japan has seasons similar to Northeastern America. This book takes place mainly in the winter at an inn with skiing and hot-springs. It was interesting to read a novel about a part of Japan I'm not familiar with, but I could somehow connect with the landscape and area, since I live in a ski town myself.

If you're looking for a quick read, this is a good pick. This only took me two days to read. It's easy writing too. Mostly dialogue and kind of a straightforward plot.

[dooney-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rather opaque novel in which the plot and purpose really escapes me. Perhaps there is symbolism here that I just did not recognize. Beautiful writing in passages, and several powerfully beautiful vignettes and descriptive passages. There is a strong them of wasted lives, and also to some extent the absence of or inability to love. Perhaps the main character of this novel is the landscape itself, and the human characters are just indifferent distractions. I'm not sure. I think I will have to read it again.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kawabata has a knack for saying a lot in very few words. I like all of his books, but if you read only one by him, this is the one you should choose. Made me wish I could read Japanese, but even in translation it is sublime.

[ken5me5old5mate · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the fifth read of my Japanese Odyssey and I am still coning to terms with reading Japanese books.

The other day I read an account by someone who had just read Kafka On The Shore and they were frustrated that they couldn't get to the "heart" of it. I knew what they meant even though I haven't read it yet.

We westerners are used to a book with a plot, a subplot or two and a beginning, middle and end. I am beginning to think that Japanese have one or more different takes on book structure. Sure I have read Japanese novels that are very western in their structure but I have equally read some where the act of looking for that structure leads you away from the book because it is not there.

I was half way into this book and trying to work out what I was reading when I came across a video of a Japanese TV program called something like Karaoke Masturbation. The contestants have to karaoke their way through a song whilst being masturbated by a beautiful young woman, I am not making this up. The contestants modesty is preserved by a small strategically placed curtain. I think the goal is to ejaculate at the end of the song. The young women do their job with gusto, stroking furiously with one hand whilst pinching nipples with the other. They also suck the nipples to hurry on that fateful moment. Every quaver in the contestants voice in response to the ministrations of the young woman begets gales of laughter by the audience. At the moment of ejaculation the camera is focussed downwards, in this case the money shot is hitting the floor. Points are awarded by how near the end of the song they came.

The thing is that I cannot imagine anywhere where you could see a program like this. Certainly not in good old sexually repressed New Zealand. Definitely not in violence obsessed/sexually phobic America. I did think that you may see it in England, but not this year or next. This is, for me, the paradox of the Japanese. A culture where social standing and "face" are of the utmost importance and shame quite often leads to suicide and at the same time you can see public wanking shows. WTF?

The blurb for Snow Country says very high things indeed and yet you could quite easily miss that in the reading of it. The main character in the book is the landscape and the season and the everything natural that is there, The people are almost superfluous but not really. On a prosaic level it is the story of an alcoholic prostitute and a rich loser. But on a poetic level it is the meeting of two souls, one of which is not straightforward and the other is dead inside.

Did I understand it? No, Did I enjoy it? I don't even know if that is an appropriate question anymore. I am glad I read it and I still think most of it went over my head.

[missizicks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I absolutely loved this book. On the surface, nothing much seems to be going on. Shimamura, a man of leisure who has inherited so much wealth that he doesn't need to work, spends long stretches of time in a hot spring town with Komako, a local geisha, leaving his wife and children in Tokyo. Neither Shimamura nor Komako know or will acknowledge what they want from life. Both lack energy, drifting along, reacting to events rather than controlling them, or controlling them through inaction. Beneath the surface is the potential for passion, but neither possesses the motivation to act. The book is dreamlike in the way it jumps around and seems to have meaning without saying anything clearly. The dysfunctional relationships across the piece intrigue and frustrate equally. The prose is beautiful, with rich descriptions of time and place, like an extended haiku. I found it quite cinematic.

[squeakychu · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I know that this is supposed to be Kawabata's finest work, but it didn't appeal all that much to me. What I liked about it was the description of the snow country. However, had I not read the introduction to the book, I would have missed out on the significance of this area of Japan. I also didn't care too much for the fact that the whole book was about how a married man with children spent his time traveling to and remaining with geisha Komako. I realize that this is a cultural thing. I'm also not sure what the message of this book is. The ending didn't prove satisfactory one way or the other. I have enjoyed others works by Kawabata, but this was not among those I like the best.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read the Seidensticker translation and was not blown away by the writing of Snow Country. As the title suggests, the setting is an important part of the book, making the theme of isolation explored by the characters physically manifest in the landscape as well. Thus evocative descriptions of the setting are important, and I largely did not find them here. I do not know if this was a failing of Yasunari Kawabata or the translator. Some of the imagery was downright bizarre, like when a geisha's lips are described as a "beautiful little circle of leeches." The picture it brings to mind is gross, despite the text making it explicit that the image is "beautiful."

The character of Shimamura who the novel follows is bland, largely a nonentity in the text despite ostensibly being an important figure. The character of the alcoholic geisha Komako is far more interesting, while the third main character of Yoko is a bit of a mystery, as the book spends relatively little time with her. As is pointed out in the novel's opening, mountain geishas were little different from prostitutes. Therefore I read the book keeping in mind the possibility that Komoko's actions were largely motivated by her desire to keep a paying client, and that Shimamura is actually relatively unimportant. I saw little to contradict this view, as Shimamura, despite the novel granting him the central role, is a mere visitor to this country, and observer more than a participant. He comes and goes as he pleases, and the lives of Komako and Yoko move along without him in his absence.

These observations of mine might seem to skip around at random a bit, but in my defense the text does the same thing. Scenes occur with wide gaps in time between them, decisions are made with little to no explanation or justification, and one line of dialogue often seems largely divorced from the next. It's a strange style, almost like reading random snippets of a stream of consciousness novel. Again, I don't know how much of this was due to the translator. Like I bet the character Shimamura would do if this novel extended past its ending, I will leave Snow Country behind me and likely won't remember it at all in a few month's time.

[snash_44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Story of a man and his geisha who lives in the Snow country. Both people are distant, impenetrable, lonely, living wasted lives. Their emotional states are expressed in the nature around them. A short novel that reads like a poem.

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After reading Thousand Cranes last month I wanted to read more Kawabata and this one I wish was better, just by a bit. It is quite different. A short novel that is translated from Japanese and the prose is beautiful. Really lovely imagery that hooks you on the train ride into the mountains that begins the story, a story about love or something like it. A man who seems incapable of it. The setting of the story is very interesting, but two of the main characters less so. I suppose there is partly a cultural divide between me and 1930's Japan at work here. I didn't understand why people were acting as they did. In my mind I needed more background to understand how and why these people were as they were. We are given background on the characters as the story progresses. I know my lack of knowledge of different cultural norms impeded some of my understanding. For example, I was perplexed why the man who had come to the mountains regarded the Geisha at the hot spa resort as essentially prostitutes and little more. After a small amount of research I discovered that so-called hot-spring Geisha were in fact commonly regarded that way by most Japanese. I had difficulty understanding why the man was as he was also. So this is how you learn about culture sometimes.Edward G. Seidensticker is the translator as he was for Thousand Cranes. He writes an excellent introduction to my edition but there is a rather glaring problem. After some excellent background material for the reader, he gives away stuff he should have let the reader have the joy of experiencing fresh. The intro did really whet my appetite for the book, but I know the discussion, especially the details about the climax of the novel would bother some readers. It slightly spoiled it for me.This was written in parts between 1935-1947, starting as a short story and reaching final form as a novel in 1947. My edition dates from 1972. I will be reading more of this author.

[morgan_mott · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't think I got the full impact of this book by reading a translation. The poetry of the narrative was beautiful, although I frequently found myself wondering which character was being described. Since the poetry and NOT the plot is supposedly the main focus of this novel, it was somewhat of a slow read.

My biggest problem with this edition of the book is that the introduction, which gives excellent context to the story, ALSO GIVES AWAY KEY PLOT POINTS. It revealed the scenes that occur at both the climax and the ending. I was furious.

[amelish · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Much is made of a pivotal scene towards the end of the book, when Shimamura switches from calling Komako "a good girl" to calling her "a good woman." The introduction calls out this change in tone as the climax of the novel. I spent some time teasing out the differences between those two phrases before realizing that the meaning is more clear in the original Japanese, and that the connotations of each are changed in translation.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My first Kawabata. Intense feelings in sparse words.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story line is straightforward; Shimamura, a married, middle-aged Tokyo man regularly visits the hot springs west of the mountains, in the so-called snow country, to see his geisha Komako. On one of the trips back, he sees and becomes attracted to another woman, Yoko.It’s a stark novel that is cold and lonely; there is a pervasive feeling of somber sadness here. The snow country geisha, as opposed to the city geisha, is more of a social outcast, as prostitution is more apparent in her case, so Komako’s life is one of wasted beauty with no future. Shimamura is an emotional loner who cannot connect in any real way to any of the women in his life. There is a subtle beauty in Kawabata’s writing that many love (and indeed, helped him ultimately earn a Nobel Prize), and I don’t mind the themes explored in this novel, but they are expressed too subtlety for my taste.Quotes:“Somewhere in his heart Shimamura saw a question, as clearly as if it were standing there before him: was there something, what would happen, between the woman his hand remembered and the woman in whose eye that mountain light had glowed? Or had he not yet shaken off the spell of the evening landscape in that mirror? He wondered whether the flowing landscape was not perhaps symbolic of the passage of time.”“The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night color. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.”“Now that he knew Yoko was in the house, he felt strangely reluctant to call Komako. He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komanko’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.He was sure that Yoko’s eyes, for all their innocence, could send a probing light to the heart of these matters, and he somehow felt drawn to her too.”“He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snowing piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.”

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[rebarelishesreading · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The little picture on the cover of my copy of Snow Country was so appealing I decided to dive right in and I'm so glad I did. This little book is a delight. It reminded me of looking at a Japanese painting -- so simple and yet so meaningful. It's the story of the relationship between a wealthy married man, Shimamura and a geisha, Komako. It would be a love story except the difference in their stations prevents either of them from thinking of it that way.

[technodiabla · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I just could not make myself like this book. I thought if I kept reading I would get drawn in and start to care, but no, I didn't. I liked the writing style so I will try some other novels by Kawabata, but this book just left me cold. The two characters are pathetic, unsympathetic, and not well developed. Komako is particularly annoying; I wanted to slap her. The fact that Shimamura didn't slap her just shows what a lazy dud he is. This is billed as a tragic love story but I didn't feel or see any signs of love. Co-dependence maybe. I was reading as fast as I could so I could be done and move on.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Book Report: Married, bored (but I repeat myself) aesthete, philanderer, and flaneur Shimamura, an aficionado of Western ballet (although he's never seen one), takes a solo trip into Japan's Snow Country. While there in the wildest of boondocks Japan possesses, he meets Komako, probably the world's worst geisha, but apparently a fascinating contrast to all other women for Shimamura. They meet a total of three times in two years. Another woman, Yoko, hovers purposelessly around the narrative until, for no apparent reason, Komako and Shimamura have a fight over his feelings (?) for Yoko, who for some reason nursed Komako's not-quite-fiance Yukio while he died, despite the fact that Komako indentured herself to the (apparently quite unsuitable) career of geisha to pay for his death expenses.Then a fire breaks out and Komako runs into the burning building and saves Yoko while Shimamura stands there and looks up at the sky. Fin. No, seriously.My Review: I spent the entire month I was reading this book, all 175pp of it, alternately claustrophobic and bemused. WTF, I kept thinking, why am I still at this rock-pile, trying to winkle out some small purpose to the narrative; then along would come a gem, eg: "It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void." (p44, Vintage ed., trans. Seidensticker)Oh wow, I thought, and plowed on. And on. And on. Every damn time Komako exhibits what today we'd call a bipolar break exacerbated by alcohol abuse, I'd find myself thinking, "This damned book is Come Back, Little Sheba directed by Kurosawa." Seriously. Shirley Booth did the same bloody role in that movie, only Burt Lancaster (whose role as her husband bewitched by a younger woman was pretty much exactly like Shimamura) is the one who drank.I drank a good bit myself, trudging ever onward, marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before; okay, I'm a piss-poor Christian soldier, but you get the sense of futility I was experiencing. Then, it happened.Pp154-155: "He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely...All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever."So there *is* a point to this hike! And a profound one: The sudden awakening of human feeling in an otherwise dead heart. It was a payoff, and a major one. But did it have to be such a Bataan Death March of a journey to get here? And the stupid-ass last line of the book, which made me so bloody angry that I began raining curses on the lady whose idea it was our book circle read the book...! INFURIATINGLY SOPHOMORICALLY PORTENTOUS, I shrieked. The dog ran away from me. The same dog who, at an earlier moment in my tossing about of the book, expressed her opinion of it by fanging the corner. She calmed down after I did, but really...does one *want* to read this book? I won't do it again. But, on balance and after sleeping on it, I'm glad that I did.

[litreact · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found it strange how the character was taken in at times (too much, at times) by the images of beauty that reality begins to fade away yet understood that, in Japan, there are times when a salary man walking down the road would just suddenly stop and stare at the falling cherry blossom petals. I loved, however, how Kawabata painted the different images of beauty his main character encountered with delicate words, as if fearing that using the wrong word would destroy the image. All in all, Yukiguni tickles the reader's mind and perception of beauty and reality and that, for me, makes it a great read.

[marysgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From the back:"With the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata tells a story of wasted love set amide the desolate beauty of western Japan, the snowiest region on earth. It is there, at an isolated mountain hotspring, that the wealthy sophisticate Shimamura meets the geisha Komako, who gives herself to him without regrets, knowing that their passion cannot last."My review: This is a highly stylistic book, beautifully written. It was originally published in installments and shows in its episodic nature. Kawabata paints a poignant picture with spare words, so it's a quick read. But it's also difficult read. If you skim over the surface of the text, not much happens. You have to read deep and think about the word pictures for the true genius of the work to shine through.This book is not for everyone, but I enjoyed it.