Snow Country
- Sep 10, 2010
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 18
★★★☆☆
Considering its publication date, it's not surprising that Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country reminds me of nothing if not a high-mannered 1950's Hollywood film where nary a sense of impropriety may be breached—despite the novel's depiction of a wealthy, idle gentleman and his love affair over many years with a young geisha. There is, for obvious reasons, a fatalism that surrounds the two lovers, and this hopelessness and desperation I found both moving and haunting. At the same time, however, most of their interactions were tedious and frustrating, as if there was nothing more to reveal than the bickering that comes with any doomed relationship. I've read elsewhere that much may be lost in Edward G. Seidensticker's translation, though I'm not sure I can come to the same conclusion, as there are a number of beautifully translated passages, and the pacing, while glacially slow for much of the novel, is appropriate given the setting—even while I was constantly urging that pace to quicken. When it finally does in the last dozen or so pages, with a dramatic fire in the town, Kawabata reaches for the stars, literally and figuratively, with repeated references to the Milky Way as he strains to make his otherwise quaint story of star-crossed lovers universal and timeless. This abrupt shift in theme and pace felt labored and heavy-handed, and undid much of whatever little goodwill I otherwise felt to that point. Kawabata is clearly a skilled writer, but I can't help but feel that this story suffers from either too little ambition or too much—or more likely both, which is ultimately its undoing.
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