Opening with one of the most famous lines in Japanese literature ¡ª ¡°Emerging from the long border tunnel, they entered snow country,¡± shifting us at speed from the darkness of the tunnel into the bright light of the snow ¡ª Yasunari Kawabata¡¯s novel ¡°Snow Country¡± tells of a city-dwelling, worldly aesthete Shimamura who travels to an onsen (hot springs) retreat in winter and resumes his casual affair with Komako, a beautiful young ¡°mountain geisha,¡± a rustic panderer to male desire.
What most people assume the novel to be about is the evocation of a quintessentially Japanese world, cut off by that long tunnel from the rapidly modernizing and Westernized world of the cities, a throwback to older, slower times and distinctively Japanese sensibilities.
What they perhaps do not realize about ¡°Snow Country¡± ¡ª and what is key to appreciating the novel ¡ª is that it was in fact Kawabata¡¯s radical attempt to apply the techniques of modernist, post-cubist Western painting to a Japanese literary canvas.
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