雪国 [Yukiguni]
Fiction, Japan
Yasunari Kawabata
Vintage
1948
eBook
175
Japanese
Edward G. Seidensticker
August 23, 2021 September 23, 2021
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Nobel Prize recipient 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.
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.
About the book
Snow Country is a novel set in Japan in 1930. The plot is not complicated, it is almost absent but what stands out in this story is the setting. We are in fact in the north of the largest island of Japan where it snows a lot during the winter and the style of the book, is a bit aseptic, like the environment.
