Snow Country (1948)

“This—‘The white of the snow fell away into the darkness some distance before it reached them.’—That’s just … Yasunari Kawabata, you know, so in the moment. And this novel is quite … I think I’ve talked about this before, but I’m talking about it again, and I guess I’ll talk about it again because I love this so much. One of the best. Because it really … I don’t know, there’s something so magical, something so descriptive—of course descriptive—magical, something so now, here, but there’s a sort of undercurrent of sadness.”

Snow Country (Japanese: 雪国 Yukiguni) is a novel by the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972). The novel is considered a classic work of Japanese literature and was among the three novels the Nobel Committee cited in 1968, when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in a remote hot spring (onsen) town in western Japan.