"Snow Country," by Yasunari Kawabata (Session 1)

Our book club's second meeting transports us to 1930s Japan. Kawabata is regarded as one of Japan's greatest authors--so much so that he was the country's first Nobel Prize in Literature winner, in 1968--and Snow Country is widely considered the laureate's masterpiece. For the month of love, we'll be following the evolution of a passionate affair, albeit a doomed romance. Will we also consider this a work of master craftsmanship, as have so many before us across the decades?

Publishing Date: 1948
Number of Pages: 175, Vintage International Edition
Author Nationality: Japanese
Translation: from Japanese, by Edward G. Seidensticker

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.