Description:
This week we’re reading the first half of Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. It is the story of a well to-do traveler named Shimamura who heads into the mountains as a relief from the busy world of Tokyo - this is known as Snow country, where in the winter seasons the snowfall can accumulate to up to fifteen feet.
During his stay at the inn in a mountain village he is introduced to the young, fickle geisha Komako, an intriguing and erratic personality. Both her and Shimamura oscillate between attraction and repulsion in this somber tale of the impossible love between a mountain geisha and a city dweller. We leave off this first section with Shimamura leaving for Tokyo, not sure if what he experienced was real and Kamako heading back to attend to a sick friend.
Yasunari Kawabata was the son of a well established family in Osaka. After establishing himself as a respected writer in Japan, he founded the New Writing movement as an intervention between the Naturalist writers of the establishment and the proletarian writers of the Socialist and Communist movements. The New Writing movement’s guiding principle was “art for art’s sake.”
Kawabata is one of Japan’s most celebrated authors and is internationally recognized being the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. In addition to Snow Country, he has been the author of several other novels such as “Thousand Cranes”, “The Sound of the Mountain”, and “The Old Capital”. His style is marked by a sense of mystery and minimalism, and a common subject of his work, including Snow Country, is the idea of ill-fated love.
Kawabata died in 1972 which was officially concluded to be a sucide by gassing, although there is some doubt whether it was accidental. Kawabata was friends with the famous Japaense novelist Yukia Mishima, and it is recounted by Kawabata’s biographer Takeo Okuno, that after Mishima’s suicide Kawabata was plagued by nightmares about his deceased friend.
Supplementary:
An interview with Kawabata:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_SoosDTMP0
Next Week and Contact Information:
Next week we are reading the second half of Snow Country.
You can call and leave voicemails on our Book Nerds Hotline and we'll play them on the show:
1-978-255-3404
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