Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948)

A married Tokyo dilettante visits the mountainous west of Japan to continue his affair with a troubled local geisha.

Book Review: Snow Country quietly seeps into the reader's subconscious in bits and pieces, subtle, gently sketched. Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) carefully crafts a picture of two individuals who will never connect, who might as well live on separate planets. One feels deep honest passion, the other is incapable of genuine feeling, but somehow they meet and try to form an attachment. Softly written about emotions that should set the characters screaming. The man, Shimamura, is an "idler who inherited his money." He only appreciates the aesthetics of life, without emotion or involvement. He can write about the art of Western ballet without having the slightest desire to see one. He can have an affair with a gradually disintegrating woman, without the slightest interest in knowing her. He only appreciates her tragic beauty, her "life as beautiful but wasted." He appreciates only the concept, not the feeling of, emotion. Unfortunately, the opacity of his emotional distance keeps the reader from knowing the geisha Komako better, but that may simply be my being a bad reader. Kawabata has, in his understated manner, given us all the clues to her existence and state of mind: the drunkenness, the incoherence, the mood swings, the mad laughter. In a book about the lack of emotion, my emotions weren't involved as they should've been, for whatever reason. The translator states in his introduction that Kawabata's writing has roots in haiku, which seems right to me. Just as a well written haiku is open to multiple interpretations (though that may be just my view), so Snow Country is capable of different realizations. The difference being that for me a good haiku will give a sharp moment of emotional understanding, and this book's moment was more subdued, almost subliminal, ending with a effort to grasp the whole revelation in a single line. Living in snow country as I do, where we get as much snow as does the landscape Kawabata writes about, gave me no insight into this deceptive novel. Written in another place and time, Snow Country still bound me with delicate feelings that slowly unraveled as if they were my own.  [4★]