Overview
Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1937–1948) is Yasunari Kawabata's most acclaimed novel and a central reason he became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1968. Set in a remote hot-spring resort on the snow-bound western coast of Japan, it tells the story of a wealthy Tokyo dilettante's affair with a provincial geisha. The plot is almost incidental; the novel's reputation rests on its prose — sparse, image-driven, deeply influenced by haiku — and on Kawabata's portrayal of a love that both characters know cannot be sustained.
Plot Summary
Shimamura, an idle and self-indulgent expert on Western ballet who has never seen a Western ballet performed, takes the train through a long mountain tunnel and arrives at a snow-bound hot-spring town. There he meets Komako, a young geisha working in the resort. Over three visits, separated by months and seasons, their affair deepens and frays at the same time. Yoko, a younger woman caring for a dying man, hovers at the edge of the narrative — Shimamura is drawn to her in a different, more disturbing way. The novel ends with a fire in the village and an image of the Milky Way pouring over the snow.
Key Themes
Beauty as cold and distancing
Kawabata's Snow Country is beautiful on every page, but the beauty is not consoling — it is a property of distance, like the stars. The novel's tone is set by this temperature.
The wasted woman
Komako gives more to the affair than Shimamura ever could; the novel knows this and does not soften it. Her wasted love is one of the saddest things in modern Japanese literature.
Tradition under modernity
The geisha tradition is dying around Komako; Shimamura's visits are tourism into something already half-vanished. Kawabata writes from inside this disappearance.
Japan's two regions
The novel's title is geographical — yukiguni refers to Japan's snow-heavy western coast, opposed to the cosmopolitan Tokyo Shimamura comes from. The two regions have different paces, different morals, different relationships to time.
Imagery as the carrier of meaning
A train window doubling as a mirror at dusk, the Milky Way at the novel's end, the falling snow itself — Kawabata's images are the novel's argument; the prose does the work plot does in other writers.
Character Analysis
Shimamura
A wealthy Tokyo man, married, bored, an unproductive expert on Western dance. Capable of perception but not commitment. The novel tracks his consciousness across three winters in the snow country.
Komako
The young geisha Shimamura begins an affair with. Beautiful, intelligent, increasingly drawn into a love that has no future. Her drunkenness, her devotion, her flashes of fury are the emotional centre of the book.
Yoko
A younger woman tending to the dying son of a music teacher. Her voice — heard first on the train as it arrives — haunts Shimamura. The novel does not let him reach her in the way he would like.
Yukio
The dying young man Yoko cares for. Largely off-stage; his existence shapes Yoko's life and indirectly shapes the novel's events.
The Music Teacher
Komako's older patron. Her presence in the resort gives the affair its precarious legitimacy.
Why read this novel
Snow Country is the novel to read if you want to understand what Japanese literary minimalism is doing. Almost nothing happens in plot terms; almost everything happens in the prose. Kawabata is one of the writers who most repays slow reading; the book is short (under 200 pages in English) but unrushed reading reveals layers that quick reading does not. Read it in winter if possible. The atmosphere is portable.
Notable Quotes
"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky."
"In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other."
"His was a beauty so pure that he felt it must be sad."
"Even his sadness gave him pleasure, that pleasure was sad too."
Share your thoughts
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