tomleetang 's review for:

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

3.0

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I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. In a sense, the events and characters of Snow Country inhabit a kind of dream world, cut off from a more concrete reality. Things exist outside of it only vaguely, intangibly. The landscape reflects the mind reflects the landscape, the characters' hidden thoughts concealed beneath the snow drifts. The prose is often beautiful, just as much as the protagonist and his lover are vaguely confusing (and confused) people - perhaps the two things go hand in hand in Kawabata's vision of the ethereal?

The novel is also a meditation on colour, with Kawabata obsessed with contrasting the pure white of the landscape against the pink of a geisha's flushed neck or thick black tresses.