Snow Country
Shimamura is a dilettante from Tokyo, privately wealthy, married, and idle enough to write essays on Western ballet he has never actually seen. Three times he travels by train through the long Shimizu Tunnel into a remote hot-spring town in Japan's snow country, where he conducts a long, slowly souring affair with a young geisha named Komako whose devotion is both absolute and, he knows, impossible for him to return. Komako drinks more each year, keeps a diary of every book she has ever read, and is tied to the town in a way Shimamura never will be. Yasunari Kawabata's novel, serialized in pieces between 1935 and 1947 and revised over decades, won him the 1968 Nobel Prize and remains one of the defining works of pre-war Japanese modernist fiction.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Snow Country
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Wealthy Tokyoite Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the snow country to visit a hot-spring resort, and the young geisha Komako who waits there. Across three trips, their affair quietly unmakes them both.
Yes. Yasunari Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Japanese author to do so. Snow Country is one of the three works the Nobel committee specifically cited (along with The Old Capital and Thousand Cranes).
Snow Country uses spare, allusive prose with extensive use of silence and implication. Most Western readers find Edward Seidensticker's translation accessible despite the cultural and stylistic distance.
Snow Country was written by Yasunari Kawabata.
Snow Country is a standalone novel by Yasunari Kawabata, not part of a series.
Snow Country is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.