Translated from Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker
Published by Penguin, 1956, 121 pages. Original version published in 1948.

Shimamura takes a train to a town in the mountains of Japan. It is cold, and there is heavy snow. Shimamura, a wealthy married man from Tokyo, is travelling to the town to see a geisha called Komako.

There is a woman on the train—whom he later finds out is called Yoko—taking care of a sick man, Yukio. He observes her reflection on the windowpane, and is taken with her eyes and voice.

When he gets to the inn, he asks the porter if the woman who lived with the music teacher was still there. The woman is Komako, who was not yet a geisha when he first met her. The porter tells him that she must have been at the station to meet Yukio, who is the son of the music teacher.

Komako is sent for, and Shimamura realizes that she is now a geisha. They spend the next few days together, with Komako visiting him regularly. In the beginning, she worries about what the inn staff will say, but by the end of his trip, she wanders in at all hours of the night.

You get a sense of the dynamics of their relationship. Shimamura seems to blow hot and cold, and Komako—against the strictures of being a geisha—falls in love with him. She moves from being casual with him, getting angry with him, and pouring out her heart to him.

But you are never sure how much of what she says is true. Shimamura learns from someone else that she became a geisha to pay the hospital bills for Yukio—something she denies. She also denies that she and Yukio were engaged. When Shimamura leaves, she insists on seeing him off, although Yoko tells her to come home because Yukio is dying. Shimamura cannot understand why she will not go.

The relationship between them is uneven. He is taken with her, enough to make the long trip to see her, but clearly, to Komako, it is more than just an affair. When he returns to the town in autumn, she is angry with him because he broke his promise to visit her in February for a children’s festival. She cut short her holiday to get back, thinking he was coming, while he seems to have forgotten all about it.

The novella is divided into two parts, reflecting Shimamura’s two trips to see Kamako, once in winter and once in autumn. There isn’t much of a plot as such, and the writing feels dreamlike. The descriptions of the landscape are evocative, and Edward G. Seidensticker does them justice in his translation.

You also get a sense of how the “mountain people” live and their customs. Shimamura visits a town where they weave Chijimi linen. “The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the snow, and bleached in the snow.” Shimamura owns some kimonos made from this material, and is sorry to find that it is a dying art.

The novel was written in 1948, a time when Japan was modernizing. The Chijimi weavers seem to have become a casualty of this modernizing. There are mentions of snow ploughs, and an avalanche warning system. Things are also changing in the geisha world. Komako tells Shimamura that they once would have all looked out for each other, but now it’s each one for herself.  

This is a love story, and not in the traditional sense. It is a vignette of the relationship between two people, each caught up in their own worlds.

Yasunari Kawabata was part of the Shinkankakuha movement in art, which was a reaction to the Japanese school of Naturalism, offering instead new perceptions in literature. The movement also drew on film, and the vivid writing in Snow Country reflects this. Although the novella feels, in a way, insubstantial (and this is not a criticism), when I was reading it, I could almost see it as a black-and-white film.

Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes was the first Japanese novel I read, and it is a delight to rediscover this writer all these years later.