A Study Guide for Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535833424

Book preview

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Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata

1957

Introduction

Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country (originally published in 1947, translated into English in 1956) tells an impossible love story between the wealthy and detached Shimamura and the colorful geisha Komako in a snow drenched hot-spring resort in Japan's coldest region. Considered Kawabata's finest work, the novel is balanced perfectly between delicate emotions and harsh realities, total confusion and strict predictability.

A talented but melancholy writer, nicknamed The Master of Funerals, Kawabata successfully brought Japanese fiction to the attention of the literary world during his lifetime. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968—the first Japanese writer to do so—for his masterful storytelling and dedication to the literary community. It must be kept in mind that, as Van C. Gessel writes in his biography of Kawabata, Three Modern Novelists: His sense of narration little resembles what Western readers normally regard as ‘plot development.’ However, if read with an eye for subtlety and a heart open to the ultimate beauty and sadness of personal connections, Snow Country can have a profound and mesmerizing effect.

Edward G. Seidensticker's translation (Vintage International, 1996) is widely available in bookstores and libraries. Seidensticker was the first to translate Kawabata's fiction into English and accompanied him to the Nobel Prize award ceremony as his personal translator.

Author Biography

Kawabata, born on June 14, 1899, in Osaka, Japan, experienced a rash of family deaths very early in his youth that would shape his personality and writing. His father and mother died from tuberculosis when he was only a baby. He moved in with his grandparents, but soon after, his grandmother, his only sister, and his grandfather passed away, leaving Kawabata alone in the world. So frequently did he attend funerals that a cousin nicknamed him Master of Funerals.

Kawabata was an excellent but distracted student, and his passion for reading flourished in school at the expense of his grades and attendance record. He was first published in small-time newspapers and literary magazines before finishing middle school. In high school, he continued to flounder academically while receiving high praise for his writing abilities.

Kawabata graduated from Tokyo Imperial College in 1924 and found love with his wife-to-be in 1925. Snow Country was written in small installments. The first, The Mirror of an Evening Scene, was published in 1935. Kawabata had not planned to write a novel, but when the various short stories were first collected and published together in 1937, he won a large sum of money and much praise from the literary community. Kawabata worked on Snow Country until his death, publishing the version Western readers are familiar with in 1947, which