Snow Country

雪国 · Yukiguni · published 1948 · ISBN 9780679761044

Kawabata Yasunari — Kawabata Yasunari (1899 – 1972) — Japan, writing in Japanese. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.

“for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” — The Nobel Committee citation

About Kawabata Yasunari

Japanese novelist and the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. A master of fragile, melancholy beauty (mono no aware) and of the silences and the unsaid that give his prose its haunting restraint.

How it came to be

Written in fragments over more than a decade (1935–1947), the novel is set in the snow-covered mountains of western Japan, where the snow buries the landscape and the characters' inner lives alike. The Nobel committee cited it as one of his most representative masterpieces.

What Snow Country is about

Shimamura, a wealthy idler from Tokyo, returns again and again to a snowbound hot-spring town in western Japan and falls for the geisha Komako. It is a love both lovely and hopeless, whitened by the snow and by the cold passing of time.

Analysis & legacy

Snow Country is an ink-wash painting of fragile beauty and passing sorrow — what the Japanese call mono no aware. Kawabata wrote it in fragments across more than a decade, laying down each stroke by hand: steam rising from a hot spring into the snowbound air, a bell ringing in the stillness, a woman's eye reflected in the glass of a night train window. The doomed affair between Shimamura and the geisha Komako is beautiful precisely because it is wasted — a beauty that falls into nothing. With few events and much silence and suggestion, the book does not tell a story so much as hand you a state of the soul. The Nobel committee named it as one of the three masterpieces on which his prize rests.

Themes: Ephemeral beauty · Mono no aware · Hopeless love · Nature · Silence

Rating: 3.5/5 from 15 ratings (Open Library).

What critics say

• Little happens -- until the end, which is then all the more devastating and effective, the full tragedy of these three characters and their relationships to each other emerging in an icy finale. — The Complete Review, complete-review.com
• Named by the Nobel committee as one of the three representative masterpieces on which his prize was founded. — Ủy ban Nobel, Nobel 1968

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