Snow Country by Yasanuri Kawabata was first published in 1956. The Penguin Modern Classic which I read was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. It’s a short read at just 121 pages.

Shimamura is a married man and has children, he’s a wealthy man, he inherited his money and is in the habit of leaving the city and travelling to the west coast mountains of Japan, where winter arrives early. He’s travelling there by train and he recognises Yoko by her reflection on his window. She’s a part time geisha and it transpires that she had chosen that profession as her fiance is seriously ill, and she needs to pay for his medical care. The young man is travelling with her and Yoko is tending to him wrapping him up against the cold, he looks seriously ill.

It’s another geisha that Shimamura has come to see though. He believes he’s in love with Komako, she’s very quiet and demure and really not at all the sort of woman who you would expect to become a geisha, hired out every day to entertain strange men at parties – and more. I imagine that a Japanese reader would get much more out of the book than I did, although the translation seems faultless with no clunky bits. There are lots of mentions of moths and apparently they signify the non permanence and transient nature of life – according to Google!  I suppose that is what the book is about. There are some lovely descriptions in it, which I always enjoy in any book.

Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, this was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee.