¡°The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.¡±
Few opening lines in the canon of domestic literature match that of Yasunari Kawabata¡¯s ¡°Snow Country¡± in terms of fame. Pretty much every Japanese person knows it by heart having memorized it in high school, despite not being able to recount the plot.
¡°Snow Country¡± is set in the mountains of Niigata, near Echigo-Yuzawa Onsen, today an hour by shinkansen from Tokyo but a much longer journey in 1935, when the novel was written. In it we follow married ballet critic Shimamura, torn in a love triangle between a geisha (Komako) and a shamisen teacher (Yoko). At that time Echigo-Yuzawa Onsen was just a hot-spring resort, but today it also houses the biggest ski resort accessible for daytrips from the capital.
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