Rating: 
Summary: Beauty of Sadness
Review: A very symbolic and psychological novel in which nature is a very important backdrop. I felt a plane of silence, the silence of snow, throughout the novel. I felt the internal bleakness of the characters. Komako is the representation of beauty and love going to waste. She shows that both love and beauty are transient. She lives in the snow country, but she is always beautifully red. This shows her desperation and the love which she is denied. Both women are symbolic of beauty and love, but they will both go to decay in the snow country. They are like their images on glass, which are transient things.
Rating:
Summary: So many themes, I don't know where to begin
Review: After completely hating (and saying so in a previous review) Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain, I wanted to find out why he was selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was not disappointed again. Snow Country is a deep, multi-themed, and ultimately satisfying novella.Kawabata tells the story of Shimamura, a married Tokyo denizen whose passion for the ballet and western dance is so strong that to actually behold a real performance would shatter the pristine dream he has imagined it to be, who travels to Japan's "snow country" and has a relationship with Komako, a young Geisha. I imagine that I'm stretching the analogy, but the Buddhist teachings of impermanence and suffering are an overarching theme of this story. Everything changes. To resist that change is to bring suffering. Yet, throughout the story, every character seeks some comfort in holding onto the past, the ideal dream. When Komako realizes she is aging and the flower of youth is passing from her, she suffers greatly. When Yoko yearns for a lost love, she goes insane. Only Shimamura, who does not seem to desire the past but is satisfied with the present seems to come through this unscathed. I'm not doing Snow Country justice by such a shallow interpretation, though. Even knowing the whole of this story from the outset would not diminish the pleasure of reading this book. 5 stars, without any reservations.
Rating:
Summary: So many themes, I don't know where to begin
Review: After completely hating (and saying so in a previous review) Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain, I wanted to find out why he was selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I was not disappointed again. Snow Country is a deep, multi-themed, and ultimately satisfying novella. Kawabata tells the story of Shimamura, a married Tokyo denizen whose passion for the ballet and western dance is so strong that to actually behold a real performance would shatter the pristine dream he has imagined it to be, who travels to Japan's "snow country" and has a relationship with Komako, a young Geisha. I imagine that I'm stretching the analogy, but the Buddhist teachings of impermanence and suffering are an overarching theme of this story. Everything changes. To resist that change is to bring suffering. Yet, throughout the story, every character seeks some comfort in holding onto the past, the ideal dream. When Komako realizes she is aging and the flower of youth is passing from her, she suffers greatly. When Yoko yearns for a lost love, she goes insane. Only Shimamura, who does not seem to desire the past but is satisfied with the present seems to come through this unscathed. I'm not doing Snow Country justice by such a shallow interpretation, though. Even knowing the whole of this story from the outset would not diminish the pleasure of reading this book. 5 stars, without any reservations.
Rating: 
Summary: Plain and unextraordinary
Review: As the so-caled masterpiece of one of Japan's most renowned writer, and one of the only two who have been awared a Nobel prize for literature (so far), I had pretty high expectations for this book. Neverthless, no sooner had I started reading than I found myself stuck into a nondescript, monotonous narrative. Throughout the book I've been kept on hold for some action or event that never really happened (except maybe the fire at the end). For a Nobelist, Kawabata lacks a talent for rich, vivid and accurate descriptions of his own country, in a way that Alan Booth could capture so perfectly in "The Roads to Sata" or "Looking for the Lost". The plot, which is based on a romance and geisha atmosphere, leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to the superb and gripping "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden. This book has disappointed me. If even Western writers can depict better Japanese landscapes and traditional lifestyles, or render the spirit of time and people in a more emotionally compulsive way than this giant of Japanese literature, the problem might just reside in the translation itself. Seidensticker is, however, one of the most famous translator of Japanese literature into English. I'll have to read the Japanese version to tell. But the story is so basic and boring that it can hardly be much better. If you are to read it in English, you'd as well give it a miss, except if you want to say you've read Kawabata... NB : Some readers have found the story interesting because of sort of secret affair going one between a married man (Shimamura) and a geisha (Komako). However, this was and still is tacitly acceptable in Japanese society. As Seidensticker puts it in the introduction, "The special delights of the hot spring are for the unaccompanied gentleman. No prosperous hotspring is without its geisha and its compliant hotel maids." Nothing is said regarding the two having sex, but every Japanese would understand it implicitly. Japanese are much less ashamed of sex as Judeo-Christian morals haven't penetrated their society. They have a more matter-of-fact approach, and Japanese men aren't known for being romantic. Traditionally, getting married is more of an alliance between families or a business to make and raise children in a common house than a love affair. The big gap with Western mentality is that once a woman has children her husband doesn't regard her as a woman any more, but a mother. As she will usually turn all her affection to her child(ren), the man is understood to be free to play around, or at least being entertained by other women, be them geishas, or nowadays hostesses. Not unlike with Shimamura, men will not necessarily seek love, but just a feminine presence that care about and praise them. Both geishas and hostesses have the choice to have sex with their customers or not like any single ordinary woman. As Komako says : "No one forces a geisha to do what she doesn't want to. It's entirely up the the geisha herself". Without knowing these aspects of Japanese culture, the book might be misunderstood by an outsider. However, once you know about this, that makes the book even more unexceptional and banal for any Japanese could have written a similar story - at least anybody from Kawabata's generation.
Rating:
Summary: Dig those characters
Review: I am always impressed when writers successfully lets a character form and grow as the story goes, just using dialogue, events and some trains of thought. Kawabata lets you catch glimpse after glimpse of the characters in this novel and by the end you have a more or less sharp image of what they really are like. The beauty of it, I think, is that this image is neither complete nor directly incomplete, but more like a pond (if I may be so poetic), that is; you see the moving surface, you see the reflections and you sense the depth and maybe the distorted layers underneath. He gives you a chance to understand the characters but not the right to judge them.
Rating: 
Summary: Snow Coutry
Review: I read the novel Snow country by Kawabata in both Japanese and in English almost simultaneously. Upon doing this however, I found that some parts of the book were poorly translated, some even giving it a different meaning. So if you do get a chance to read the book I highly recommend reading it in its original language. I am not discouraging anyone from reading the book for it was beautifully composed in it giving a very sensational and descriptive tone to the book, which is a very evident character in Kawabata's books.
Rating:
Summary: A Rake's Non-Progress
Review: I studied Japanese for four years in college and as a senior, more years ago than I care to count, I read this novel in Japanese, one of only two I ever made it through. Recently, having forgotten everything about the novel and because I have forgotten too many characters to read in Japanese anymore, I re-read it in English. SNOW COUNTRY is nothing if not a strange work. At the risk of sounding snobbish or whatever, I have to say that it is stranger in English than in Japanese. Japanese allows for a great deal of vagueness and reading between the lines. English prefers definite words about definite events. So, as I read the novel again, I did wonder why I had found it so enthralling the first time and concluded that language had something to do with it. Nothing is definite. As usual, Kawabata is not strong on plot. An idle playboy-type (we never learn where his money comes from) visits a resort in the mountains of Western Japan, facing the Japan Sea, the snowiest region of the world. He meets an offbeat sort of geisha, Komako. He rather likes her: she likes him, maybe more than that, but the relationship is touchy. Everything is extremely vague, the surroundings are beautiful, and as always, the reader can enjoy the Japanese fascination with the tiniest details of the natural world. Komako, available and prone to drink, is contrasted to the distant Yoko, a pure girl, with a beautiful voice, who shows devotion to one man and to duty. The end perhaps underlines Kawabata's view of postwar society, his disappointment at what Japan had become. If you have read "Memoirs of a Geisha", this might be a satisfactory antidote---not that the former was bad, but it is an American viewpoint. This completely Japanese view of a geisha could be more realistic in terms of what the average geisha's life would have been like in the provinces, far from the splendid inns of Kyoto and Tokyo. If you like haiku, Mondrian, minimalist photography, you would like this novel. If however, your taste is Faulkner, Zola, Balzac, the Russians, then I doubt if you would enjoy SNOW COUNTRY.
Rating: 
Summary: Read if you enjoy Buddhist texts.
Review: I was greatly disappointed by this book. I found the main character, Shimamaru, difficult at times to identify with, mostly because of his insentivity to the things going on around him. In fact, I feel as if the book rambles on more about the scenes in nature (i.e. the mountains, the valley entrenched in snow several feet deep, the cedar groves) than about actual plotline or characters, who are only skeletally delineated. While reading this book, I experienced a stern coldness from Kawabata, as though he were purposefully trying to alienate the reader from an experience that could be told with so much more warmth, and depth. The story itself, although somewhat interesting at first glance, is nothing more than the tedium of a love tryst. Perhaps Kawabata wants us to have pity for these mountainfolk who seem entrapped in this type of isolated lifestyle (certainly inferior to that of Tokyo, although it has its own naturalistic charm), but what this book lacks the most of is emotion, or specifically, the evocation of emotion from us as readers. I felt almost nothing as I read about the lives of these characters. Despite the fact that certain passages do evoke a sense of beauty and let the imagination soar along the mountain ranges and the picturesque snow scenery, these elements about the setting cannot make up for the severe lack of characterization and depth in plot. Indeed, at the very end, when we come upon the death of a secondary character at the end, we don't feel the "connection" that somehow should be attributed to a role character's death in a novel; I was frustrated by this all throughout the novel, and I think it should be avoided at all costs, lest you waste your time on a story that probably wasn't worth the telling, and whose pictorial descriptions of the Occidental should be left to some outside textbook. What is perhaps the only saving grace of this novel (and which probably explains a lot of the "I don't care, nothing matters," mentality) is a possible appeal to Buddhist thought, and that somehow the way in which things die (e.g., dragonflies, moths, bees, human beings) is part of some natural order of things, and that the line between life and death is very tenuous indeed. All throughout the book there is countless imagery of natural objects moving in repetitive motions (e.g., cedar brushes flapping back and forth in the wind, a bee wagging its tail in a dance, a dead moth sailing to the ground like a leaf swaying from side to side) which hints at an intended circularity in the work, a line of thought also found in Buddhist scripture. Also, the use of the colors white, black, and red have special significance in this work. The white/black might obviously signify a type of "yin-yang," or the union of life and death in a circular cycle of things. The effulgent reds that appear in the novel may be symbols for the blood of life, not necessarily in man, but in nature itself, driving on natural processes in the same cyclical fashion, from day-to-night, and also day-after-day.
Rating:
Summary: Sad Beauty
Review: I will admit that when I finished the book, my first thought was something along the lines of "What? That's the end?!?" But when I thought about it, the beauty of the ending matches the beauty of Snow Country, where what is left unsaid is often just as important as what is said. To wrap up Snow Country with a more concrete, definite resolution would be an injustice in my opinion. Kawabata's aptitude for description is amazing. I could picture Yoko's reflection on Shimamura's train window, Komako's flushed cheeks, even Yoko's sadly beautiful voice with perfect clarity. The storyline is no less beautiful. Thinking of Komako and Yoko being left behind in that harsh but beautiful land, surrounded by nothing but the mountains, snow, and their complex pasts, and Shimamura returning to his spoiled idleness in Tokyo, is enough to sadden anyone. I wonder if Shimamura will ever look back at his time in the Snow Country and regret what he has lost. The only bad thing about Snow Country is that the English translation is not very good, although a good effort was made. Unlike earlier Japanese novelists like Natsume Souseki, whose writing was heavily influenced by the West, Kawabata uses the full range of wordsmanship possible in his native Japanese language. I would highly recommend the original Japanese version to anyone who has the time/ability to read it (it's "Yukiguni" in Japanese). Snow Country is truly a modern masterpiece, a deserving recipient of the praise it has been given.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely terrible
Review: I'm being generous with the one star rating. I would've given it a zero but a rating that low is impossible. There was no plot to this book. The action is so subtle that it is impossible to follow. And the ending with the observations of the Milky Way, what was that all about? It made absolutely no sense. There was no point to this book and I must say that reading it was the biggest waste of my time. There's several hours of my life I'll never get back...
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