Snow Country
Vintage International · first published 1948 · 192 pages
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.