About this title: To this haunting novel of wasted love, Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. As he chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, one of Japan's greatest writers creates a work that is dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Berkley
Date Published: 1970
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. 142 lightly tanned pgs in vg reading condition; cover has very slight wear on edges and removed sticker mark on front. Prev owners name sticker on endpaper. read more
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Satisfaction Guaranteed, fast shipping, please feel free to ask any questions! Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: fifteenth printing
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Berkley Medallion Book
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Tight binding with light edge rubbing and soft corner creases. Some light shelf rubbing & age spots on edges & back. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. 1981-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Description: Good. 1996-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Berkley Medallion
Date Published: 1960
Description: Good Plus. G425. Light rubbing to edges; tight book; tanned else very good internally. "The passionate story of a geisha's affair in an exotic pleasure resort. " Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 500 grams. Category: Vintage Paperbacks Inventory No: 018026. read more
"Snow Country is a novel about the three visits of Shimamura, a wealthy man of leisure to a hot springs mountain resort on the western side of Japan. It is spring the first time and he meets a local geisha, Komako. She is reluctant to be a geisha but feels she needs a 'protector'. Komako is immature, chatty and highly emotional.
The next visit is in the fall, Komako has grown and matured. She finds the relationship a struggle.
The final visit is in the winter and Shimamura and Komako argue and grow further and further apart. Shimamura is now attracted to Yoko, a friend of Komako. The reader wonders if the cycle will repeat itself.
This book is very lyrical. The descriptions are very well done and very detailed. The book is a love story. It starts off with young love, progresses on to a more adult type of love and finally starts to die off."
"Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's best known novel paints the human condition and the Japanese landscape in mournful hues as he constructs this tragically beautiful work. The story follows Shimamura, a Tokyo diletante, and his trips to the snow country as he searches for himself in the landscape and in his affair with a enchanting and tragic geisha, Komako.
It is in the subtlety of the narrative and lushness of description that Kawabata stands out from other Japanese authors such as Oe and Endo. The reader is softly, lightly, wisked along through the novel, as if a drifting snowflake, and more absorbs than directly obtains the meaning of this fantasitic novel."
Story is “old fashioned” to Western eyes, in that it is a love story about a (then)”modern” man and a geisha. My background in Asian studies doesn’t go deeply enough to know if this relationship would be possible nowadays in Japan, but I doubt it.
Still, the story is tender and vividly describes the lives of the people of the time. The man is the problem in this story ... a self-centered, somewhat shallow person who has enough money to do what he wants, but doesn’t really know what he wants.
The geisha figure is intelligent and unfortunate in her birth circumstances, and, in Japanese society (probably even now), doomed to her position vis-a-vis men.
Worth reading for its insights into a very different culture and time."
"Borrowed from a friend who introduced it to her book club and highly recommends it ... by a Japanese author who won the Nobel prize for literature. It's an interesting love story that has potential....NOW FINISHED: Well, I wasn't that impressed. It was rather slow moving and there wasn't enough of a plot line. I checked back with my friend and I seem to have misunderstood. She felt that it wasn't that good either. The two main characters are somewhat interesting, but you don't get enough of an insight into their personalities to form a strong opinion. The Haiku discussion in the Introduction is interesting, and I liked the female main character - Komako - a geisha. The translator says in the Introduction: "... the possibility that she will drift from one hot spring to another, more unwanted with each change, makes her a particularly poignant symbol of wasted, decaying, beauty." That single sentence made me pay close attention to her character. Komako wants so much to be loved by Shimamura - a cold, unfeeling man from Tokyo - and concludes: "After all, only women are able really to love." p. 130. I don't agree, but I felt sorry for her."
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