# Snow Country

- Author: Yasunari Kawabata
- Translator: Edward G. Seidensticker
- Original title (Japanese): 雪国
- First published: 1948
- Publisher: Vintage International
- This edition: 1996
- ISBN: 9780679761044
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); Japanese Literature in Translation

## Card

A wealthy idler from Tokyo returns to a hot-spring town in the mountains to see a young geisha.  
Sparse and luminous, with gaps everywhere, the prose moves by images far more than by plot.  
For a night when snow is falling outside.  

## About this book

Shimamura, a dilettante with a wife and children in Tokyo, takes the train through a long tunnel into the snowy mountains, where Komako, a young geisha, waits with a love he cannot quite return. Between them is another woman, Yoko, first glimpsed as a reflection in a train window. Seasons turn in the hot-spring town as his visits come and go. What lingers is the cold, clear beauty of the place and the loneliness running beneath it.

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