Rating: 
Summary: the mysterious Orient
Review: The reviewers below who trashed this book have some good points. This one isn't going to make it into Oprah's Book Club anytime soon (i.e., the characters do not triumph over adversity). However, given the amount of ink American authors at the end of the 20th century spent romanticizing the Kyoto geisha life, Kawabata's 175-page vignette of the onsen-geisha life is a valuable tonic. Kawabata opens a window into a Japan that is hard to imagine from the usual tourist perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: Snapshots from the snow country
Review: There are no revelations, no unwindings, no developments present in this book. Other than the change of season marked by two visits of the male protagonist Shimamura to the snow country, there isn't even a sense of time. Instead offered is a collection of beautiful, serene, _static_ images. Alongside the somewhat monotone dialogues between Shimamura and Komako, images of the Japanese countryside (on Hokkaido island) are "displayed" rather than "described."Characters in this novel are, so to say, lost (the Japanese have a long tradition of writing about lost characters, Murakami Haruki being the one of the latest of such authors). Komako, being a geisha and understanding that Shimamura is already married, cannot do anything. Shimamura, even after realizing he is in love with Komako, doesn't do anything. The beauty of their relationship lies in their inaction, indulgence, and pensiveness. These attributes were frozen into colorful yet subtle moments. I enjoyed such images.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Book
Review: This book was absolutely wonderful and very moving. I found myself thinking about the characters and setting for days after I finished the book. This book tells the story of tragic and hopeless love through a very unique and heartbreaking approach. The setting of the cold mountain area was described in such a way that brought chills down my back. This was an excellent book that went straight to my heart. Read it.
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Summary: the train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country
Review: this is a small yet dense novel that deserves nothing less than a scholarly analysis. so forgive me if i have to get a few things out of the way before i review it fully. this edition of the greatest, truest novel ever written also happens to be translated by the best japanese translator alive, edward g. seidensticker, who bravely translated an unabridged genji monogatari for the american masses brave enough to read it some years back. his translation is just that -- a "translation" rather than a "localization," and in so being it takes the feel and senetence structure of the original japanese and transplants it into sometimes awkward yet awkwardly beautiful sounding english. i refuse to tell you that this book is "haiku-like," or that its prose is "sparse," and "shimmering." i refuse to tell you that the "slightness" of the natural images reflects the rustle of wind in pines or a stoic, unwavering bamboo grove in a wind storm. i doubt edward g. wanted us to think that when he translated it, and i'm sure kawabata, perfectionist genius that he was, wouldn't want us to pigeonhole him so easily. i would give you a thorough lesson in lingustics, yet i've only been alotted 1,000 words to review this book, so i'll make it short. the truth is, the japanese language does not allow for nearly as much expression or description as english does. come to think of it, a haiku, in japanese, is barely descriptive at all. it merely serves a testament to a scene. westerners have these grandiose misperceptions about haiku; while most haiku describe nothing more than a natural scene in a few lines, the overall meaning is not meant to be anything specific -- a haiku is something for the writer to understand and everyone else to pretend to. it is a principle even the japanese scholars are at a loss to explain, and it is something that is merely accepted for what it is: unexplainable. now, with that out of the way, i begin my discourse on kawabata's style. if anything, his writing is "anti-haiku." a haiku requires all three lines to be read in order for the flexible "impression" to hit home. snow country, however, is a masterpiece of autonomy. the first sentence, "kokkyo no nagai ton'neru wo nukeru to, yukiguni de atta," or, "in coming out of the long border tunnel, it was snow country," implies more than most entire novels. a train, coming out of a tunnel in a different place from the one it left upon entering the tunnel... it seems simple, doesn't it? well, so does the rest of the book. however, as kawabata himself said, the book is written so that it can be ended at any sentence and still convey the same meaning, that is, the way shimamura feels when looking out his window when he is making tea near the close of the book. conversely, kawabata says, the book could also continue on for another one thousand pages. either way, the book would still lead to the same conclusion. we know that shimamura and komako are not meant for one another. to speak further on it would only be to trivialize something great, which kawabata himself would most definitely not appreciate. and now, as a side note, i would like to ask: who here has not been, at one time or another in their life, presented with such generosity that you, regardless of how giving a person you consider yourself, could not help feeling that the person being generous was acting rashly or stupidly? do you ever feel sorry for someone being THAT generous, feeling like no one deserves that kind of generosity, especially you? what causes a person to turn down a gift of money from their best friend, no matter how rich that person is and no matter how little money it is? those are the kind of questions kawabata answered in his writing without anyone ever really asking them. if you are confused by snow country, dont worry. just read it and take it at face value. if you do that enough, youll feel like you got something out of it. then, the only question is... WHATexactly did you get out of it? as a footnote, for the exact opposite of snow country, that is, a book that relies on all things explicit rather than implicit, read kawabata's own "the lake."
Rating:
Summary: Still Poetic, but Not His Best
Review: This story surrounds an arrogant, idealistic man, Shimamura, who is completely cut off from his true feelings. He uses a young prostitute, 20 year-old Komako, in the snow country of Japan to connect to his rigid ideals of love and beauty. She realizes the reason for his affections but allows herself to fall in love with him anyway. Twisted into this tale is another young girl, Yoko(not a prostitute), who also meets the main character's ideals. Symbolically, Yoko represents Komako's inner self. This is exemplified in Yoko's flaming death at the end of the novel. Yoko is Komako herself, burned and destroyed in the flames of her futile love for Shimamura. The story sounds powerful, and it is, but a great deal is lost in Seidensticker's translation.
Rating: 
Summary: pretty yet banal
Review: This was the second Yasunari Kawabata novel I have read, House of the Sleeping Beauties, and as with that novel Snow Country left me feeling a bit empty. Kawabata tells a simple story of a rich man named Shimamura who visits the Snow Country every year. Shimamura, who inherited his fourtune, lives to find pleasure, but even he knows that he lives a very superficial life. He meets a young woman named Komako, who works as a Geisha, who seems to really care about him, although she also tends to vent her anger out on him. He also meets a beautiful young girl named Yoko who Kamako hates. It seems this story is going to become the typical love triangle story, but it doesn't in fact nothing is resolved. There is no satisfactory ending only a burnt down warehouse and an unconcious or dead Yoko. She did not set the fire and there is no reason to believe that she tried to kill herself because of a doomed relationshhip with Shimamura because there was no relationship. The book was full of beautiful imagery and detail of life in the snow country, but besides that I found the book to be quite dull. The next book I read by Kawabata will be Thousand Cranes. I hope it to be better than this one. good writing, beautiful detail, but quite boring nonetheless.
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Summary: Heart of Decadence
Review: Yasunaki Kawabata was the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He is not as good a novelist as his contemporary Juchiro Tanizaki or his predecessor Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). He was a extreme right-winger who committed suicide, not unlike his protege Mishima. His most famous work, the House of Sleeping Beauties, deal with an old impotent man who is introduced to a special sort of brothel filled with beautiful, drugged sleeping women. (Oddly enough, elements of this novel later appeared in a pornographic movie of the early nineties with the same name). Snow Country is an interesting novel. The protagonist Shimamura is a married man and a dilettante, who has become an expert on the European ballet without actually ever seeing one. On a visit to the Snow Country he meets two beautiful young women; one is Yoko whom he sees on a train, the other is a geisha named Komako. He and Komako start on a relationship which both know will only last a few months. And so they do. Shimamura shows little passion, shows something more but not much more than polite concern, though he obviously sleeps with her. Komako clearly shows something different ("She walked ahead of him [to the bath] with her eyes on the floor, like a criminal being led away. As the bath warmed her, however, she became strangely gay and winsome, and sleep was out of the question.) It is this deliberately ephemeral relationship which attracts Kawabata's interest, and it attracts ours. It is written in a typically austere and severe style, concentrating on a hypostatized Nature which does not relish in gross physical detail. Consider this description of a teakettle: "skillfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from it came the sound of wind in the pines. He could make out two pine breezes, as a matter of fact, a near one and a far one. Just beyond the far breeze he heard faintly the tinkling of a bell." This makes those details which do appear particularly striking: "Insects smaller than moths gathered on the thick white powder at her neck. Some of them died there as Shimamura watched." The novel ends with an image of nature. During a climatic fire Shimamura falls and sees the Milky May in the sky above him. What is interesting in this novel is how Kawabata combines the tropes of classical Japanese literature, such as the aforementioned terseness and emphasis on an abstracted Nature, with a more modern interest in individual character. Obviously there is a gap between the Japanese and European right on the propriety of having mistresses, but in Kawabata there is no clear moral alternative mentioned to Shimamura's ultimately loveless behavior. Although Kawabata mentions the ideals of rural Japan existing the same time with time of modern tourism, this book does not obviously present an organic conservative ideal. The dialogue is terse, often unemotional. Like Jane Austen, it is a romance of pleasure, some desire, but little yearning and limited tenderness. As a portrait of cool if not cold lovelessness it is worthy of our attention.
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