A wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura takes the train through a long tunnel into the mountains of Niigata, where the snow piles up higher than the houses, and stays at a hot spring inn. There he takes up with Komako, a young geisha in a town too small to support one properly. He comes back over several winters. It’s a novel about a man who feels things at a distance and a woman who doesn’t, and the imbalance is the whole tragedy. Kawabata worked on it for over a decade and won the Nobel, and the prose in Seidensticker’s translation is nearly all image.
Snow Country