Snow Country in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 06, 2018 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it

Shelves: zen, death, japan, relationships, the-classics-club, poetry

Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante from Tokyo, travels to the snowiest region on earth and meets up with Komako, a poor provincial geisha. Snow Country tells the story of their relationship.

It's a poem of a story, complex, brimming with both the care and indifference that characterize a deep connection between two people. Like a haiku, the details of the season, of the place, fill the margins of the story, and color the emotional resonance of the relationship. The story is mysterious, with much le ...more

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Jul 03, 2013 Sunflower rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-read-2013, e-books

What did I think? It's more what I felt while reading this- cold, wintry, and even inexplicably depressed. The mood of the book seeps into everything, and the characters are equally disturbing and desolate. Shimamura appears to be a man who observes his life and his world through a pane of glass- thus avoiding any emotional involvement. Komako, a local woman who has finished her geisha training since he last visited, is the reason he comes to the snow country, and yet their interactions appear u ...more

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Apr 06, 2016 Mary Paul rated it liked it · review of another edition

IF you're undertaking "Snow Country" I hope you're sitting down, preferably on a tatami under a kotatsu, drinking a tiny cup of ujicha as flakes drift by your window... but a plain table is fine, I suppose, as long as there's a fire nearby. And I hope you're not in a hurry.

"Snow Country" was a semester requirement for me, in a non-western literature course I despised. This is probably the worst possible way to read a good book, besides perhaps a high school English class. At the time, it did not ...more

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Sep 20, 2017 Mike rated it it was ok · review of another edition

First it was surrealistic to be reading Snow Country while at burning man in a 102 degree desert. A short read, it was sad and fatalistic without characters one would like, or respect. The main character is shallow and bereft of qualities which would inspire much empathy with his life of cheating on his wife in a distant and poor part of japan while ruminating on how meaningless his or his lover's existence is.

I understand that melancholy to be a reflection of a general japanese view on the tra ...more

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