The book depicts four meetings between Shimamura and Komoko, each corresponding to a different season: spring, winter, summer, autumn. The pair become deeply infatuated with each other, drawn together another even though they are both committed to their separate lifestyles. Young and energetic while Shimamura is tired and (presumably) older, Komako’s gauche innocence and her passion to become a geisha seem to represent something missing from Shimamura’s own life. Komoko is a geisha in all but name, having trained as one but never receiving a formal license to become a courtesan. Lonely in his isolated ryokan – which is a traditional Japanese inn with an attached hot spring bath house – Shimamura calls for the company of a geisha, Komoko. Shimamura has taken himself off to a hot-spring resort in the Snow Country, where the mountain air and rugged landscape herald a more meaningful existence – at least in theory. Like most members of the idle rich, Shimamura feels listless and alienated with city life. A wood block ( ukiyo-e) illustration of the Snow Country, where the novel is set. Like the haiku, Morris said, Snow Country works through suggestion and implication alone – never saying or showing things outright, but leaving it to the reader to decide how they feel about the characters or the story.

Ivan Morris, a translator and scholar of Japanese culture and classical civilizations, called Snow Country Kawabata’s masterpiece. Snow Country has all this, if on a relatively small scale, focusing not on the zeitgeist and the changing moods of a nation, but zeroing in on the strained relationship between two individuals. He was a complicated figure: obsessed with the traditional culture of Japan and the lifestyles of its aristocracy, Kawabata’s great skill was for the elegiac – trading in nostalgia and memory and lavishing praise on the past with a doomed reverie.

When Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, the Nobel Committee named Snow Country as one of the main texts that contributed to his win. Consider this to be the first half of a mini-series on Kawabata, then. I’ve just finished his 1937 novel Snow Country, the love story of a Tokyo academic and a rural geisha, and next I’ll be reading his (quite different) novel The Master of Go. As part of this, I thought it’d be a good idea to read some Japanese literature, as a side course to my visit and who better to start with than Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel Laureate of 1968 and big name in 20th century Japanese lit. As some of my friends (not necessarily readers) will know, I’m currently travelling Japan for a month or so with a friend.

Komako snow country