Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
A snow country geisha. A man who cannot love her fully.
For you if
you want to experience the Japanese aesthetic of impermanence through the most precise prose you will ever read
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A wealthy Tokyo man travels to a mountain hot spring resort in the snow country of northwestern Japan and falls into a relationship with a geisha — a woman who loves him completely and whom he loves with the detached appreciation of someone who collects beautiful things. Kawabata writes in a prose so compressed and imagistic that each sentence carries the weight of a paragraph. The dispatch from inside the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware — the pathos of transience, the beauty of things precisely because they do not last. Nobel Prize winner. The most distilled Japanese sensibility on this shelf.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Japan • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Japanese author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Silence(2016)
dir. Martin Scorsese
What does God's silence sound like?
Two 17th-century Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to Japan to find their missing mentor and continue his mission, only to be captured amid a brutal state campaign to eradicate Christianity. Adapted from Shusaku Endo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in staying inside the missionary's doubt rather than resolving it — apostasy here isn't simple failure, it's a real moral question the film refuses to answer for you. Pedagogical in showing how colonial-era evangelism collided with a society determined to survive it, at real human cost on both sides.