Review: Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (Penguin)

Summary

Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura, and their love offers no freedom to either of them. Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata's exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and the understated passion of the young Japanese couple.

My review

I had read Snow Country years ago in French and wanted to reread it. It is not an easy task to review such a masterpiece! When I reread it, I felt as I had when I read Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. This work, through its poetry, the doomed love story, the inescapable real life, made me analyse life, and made me think about my own. It enables you to discuss with your inner self, about the meaning of life, of love... and that is a wonderful way of interacting with a story.

Yasunari Kawabata 

Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read. (goodreads)

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