Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
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at tosh's prodding i'd been on something of a japanese kick in '07 and had burned through mishima, dazai, tanizaki, murakami, etc. and was deciding which Kawabata to start with when charles sent me an interview in which william vollmann (whom i don't dig the way others do, but definitely admire his obsessiveness) listed kawabata's Snow Country as one of his ten favorite books. i picked it up and read it in a single sitting on the flight from florida to california and walked off the plane utterly...more
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
folks interested in Japanese culture and literature, obviously.
I think I read prize-winning novels just to wrinkle my nose at their non-prize-winning writing.
Depending on the day of the week, I like Japanese literature a whole lot... or I despise it for the almost inevitable copout (but it's supposed to MEAN something) endings. Snow Country succeeded in keeping me somewhere around the middle of the road. Didn't love it, didn't hate it - it's just one of my "should-read"s that has finally been read.
I found the "hero" (as...more
Depending on the day of the week, I like Japanese literature a whole lot... or I despise it for the almost inevitable copout (but it's supposed to MEAN something) endings. Snow Country succeeded in keeping me somewhere around the middle of the road. Didn't love it, didn't hate it - it's just one of my "should-read"s that has finally been read.
I found the "hero" (as...more
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Read in January, 2008
Let it be known that this is a terrible translation. I am convinced that I would have enjoyed this book ten times as much if someone other than Edward Seidensticker had bothered to translate it. My reasoning? Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories is one best collections of short stories I have ever read. In the back of that book is "Gleanings from Snow Country," the last work Kawabata wrote before he died. It is a condensa...more
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I must first stress a warning: This is not one you should read casually or while on a noisy train. A good deal of time and devotion is necessary to enjoy it. It's a pure drama, and by that I mean it's not one of those suspense-filled, Chuck Norris round-house-kicking action-fests that's easy to get into, but invest some time into it and your efforts will reward you.
The pages are emotional and almost dream-like as they follow the affluent Shimamura in the "Snow Country" of west...more
The pages are emotional and almost dream-like as they follow the affluent Shimamura in the "Snow Country" of west...more
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Read in February, 2008
i was a bit disappointed with this, especially if it's one of kawabata's more celebrated (or just famous?) books, or one of his break-out books, and since he is a nobel winner. his prose is lovely, but i felt like i was watching a very tactful and well-mannered movie from the 50s where they divert your attention to nice scenery shots or where they only show the actors' legs when they're kissing. the narrative skipped forward so much that it was hard to stay oriented, and the aforementioned allus...more
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Read in June, 2008
How fitting that Kawabata is a master exposing the sublime in the most mundane; Snow Country creates a grand study of the human heart out of a mish-mash of the vulgar and pathetic. Make no mistake, Shimamura is essentially a playboy, Komako a geisha lush. Their indulgent lives play out in ritual, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes pointedly direct. Through it all, snow, beautiful and lulling, anesthetizes even the reader. Living in the snow country is committing to the whisper, the smirk and t...more
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Read in February, 2008
I'm a big fan of Kawabata. Japanese author whose work is like the fiction version of haiku: small books, precise and filled with nature imagery and quietness.
In this book, a man travels to "snow country" in Japan, where he has in the past met and fallen in love with a geisha. But thier relationship has changed when he visits there this time. This book is filled with snow and cold and winter imagery, which sets the mood for the characters' emotions and relationships. A book tha...more
In this book, a man travels to "snow country" in Japan, where he has in the past met and fallen in love with a geisha. But thier relationship has changed when he visits there this time. This book is filled with snow and cold and winter imagery, which sets the mood for the characters' emotions and relationships. A book tha...more
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Kowabata’s Snow Country has many beautiful passages, but I often found it suffering from the same problem as The Unbearable Lightness of Being: a tendency to over-explain the characters. The book was most interesting when it had a solitary character wandering through a town or landscape – I found most of the interactions to be too bogged down in the thoughts of the characters to be particularly compelling. I could see the austerity of Kowabata’s prose functioning better in ...more
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Read in February, 2008
This was my first excursion into Kawabata's work, and as an ardent fan of Japanese literature by and lare, I was impressed. Much as in a Yasujiro Ozu film, the camera glides elegantly between static, simple portraits of people, showing them going through their routines and expressing a great deal of human pathos in the process. Equal parts modernist tragedy, haiku magical realism, and Japanese fable, this is definitely one of those books to read on a gray winter afternoon and then spend a lot ...more
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Read in June, 2008
This is an enigmatic and haunting novel well worth a re-read. Kawabata's world is very cold and sad, and yet there is a delicacy and beauty throughout that makes this rather simple story feel almost supernatural. In the first section, the image of a man on a train staring at a woman through her reflection in the window pane is one of the most beautiful passages I've read in a while. Although some people consider this Kawabata's best work, I still prefer THOUSAND CRANES and BEAUTY AND SADNESS to ...more
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Kawabata creates a timeless poetic lovestory interspersed with poetic moments in descriptions of landscapes that speak for the characters' moods and provide subtle indications and foreshadowings on the relationship. While the main story is the skeleton of the book, the poetic descriptions are like joints; each reader interprets them according to his or her own experience and mentally twists the limbs of the skeleton to give shape to the creature that is this novel. Or something like that.
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Read in December, 2006
recommended to Dawn by:
Aubreyrecommends it for: Anyone who loves a good love story
I need to read this book again.
I read it at 6am on the bus on my way to the states from TO and all I remember about it, was that it was a little weird and that I was carsick from the swaying of the bus.
Aubrey recommended this to me and I had to hunt it down to get it. :)
It is about a man and his Geisha who loves him (when she knows she shouldn't) without any expectations from him. I remember it being heartbreaking to me, because isn't love that isn't returned always heartbreaking??
I read it at 6am on the bus on my way to the states from TO and all I remember about it, was that it was a little weird and that I was carsick from the swaying of the bus.
Aubrey recommended this to me and I had to hunt it down to get it. :)
It is about a man and his Geisha who loves him (when she knows she shouldn't) without any expectations from him. I remember it being heartbreaking to me, because isn't love that isn't returned always heartbreaking??
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Read in March, 2007
Beautiful novel. Its easy to see why he was the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). His prose is of the quality that you feel lost in some gorgeous poetic wonderland. Regrettably, while this is still one of my favorites, the translation is not up to par with say Thousand Cranes or others. But even though you can feel some awkwardness in the translation enough of Kawabata's poetry comes through to make it worth the read.
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Read in March, 1998
recommends it for:
Japan interests, general
Hard to rate this strongly because I feel like the translation was not able to convey Kawabata's theme extremely well. I found it on par with Hemingway in style but no other book I have read has the same method to drive the plot. Expecting more from the story but maybe I am not enjoying the plot because I am getting a poor translation, the book had some great imagery but the overall story was to subtle and didn't leave me wanting to read more.
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Read in April, 2007
Much is made of a pivotal scene towards the end of the book, when Shimamura switches from calling Komako "a good girl" to calling her "a good woman." The introduction calls out this change in tone as the climax of the novel. I spent some time teasing out the differences between those two phrases before realizing that the meaning is more clear in the original Japanese, and that the connotations of each are changed in translation.
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He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang.
This description of Shimamura in Kawabata's short and delicate novel, Snow Country, might also be a description of Kawabata himself. The "sad little dream world" in this story has a kind of melting magic; it's almost perfect.
This description of Shimamura in Kawabata's short and delicate novel, Snow Country, might also be a description of Kawabata himself. The "sad little dream world" in this story has a kind of melting magic; it's almost perfect.
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Read in January, 2006
the writing is so gentle, the scenery so vivid, the story very heartbreaking, the pacing so very gradual. The patience of the author is amazing. This is the second novel I’ve read by Kawabata, whose writing has really pierced my psyche in recent days. May I also take on some of his patience and brilliant storytelling.
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I don't know if it was the translation or the original that was off, but the story seemed to have gaps and jumps that struck me as odd. That's too bad since the ability to truly love is an important question, one which I wonder about in regards to myself. Descriptions in the story are economical which is good since affairs of the heart are best left to be pondered rather than ponderously explained in detail.
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Read in January, 2000
An elegiac, extended haiku. A rumintation on loss and desperation. I read 'Snow Country' as I walked around a small lake,l and I didn't stop walking until I was finished. It was a beautiful and meditative experience. I wasn't prepared for the ending, or the effect the book as a whole would have on me.
I know that may seem very personal, maybe solipsistic, but it's the only way I know how to say it.
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Read in June, 2002
The Japanese style of implying things, and having more subtle actions than words is very characteristic in this book. It's a story of man and a geisha, and it doesn't have a traditional plot so it's difficult to say more than that about it. But I also cried a lot and it's very beautiful.
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