Will I love Snow Country?

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese author to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature – and Snow Country is a perfect example of why he did.

It’s the simple tale of a Tokyo businessman who meets a geisha when he takes a trip to a rural onsen (hot springs) town. It’s a melancholy tale, and you feel for the geisha and her harrowing circumstance much more than the Tokyoite.

It’s also a slim book, but one with beautiful descriptions of the snow. You can read it in one sitting, but it will stick with you long after.

Again, I have a personal connection to the setting of this book, as I visited the same ryokan (Japanese inn) in the mountains of Niigata prefecture where Kawabata wrote much of this novel. There seem to be two types of reader experiences with this book—one in which readers feel the characters are too cold and unrelatable, and others who find a melancholy beauty in the old way people used to live and relate to each other. And there’s certainly warmth in the character of Komako, the geisha who wastes her dreams on an unrequited love, if not in Shimamura,… show more.