Sometimes you read a book with beautiful prose and well-constructed characters but, when you put it down, you couldn’t tell the plot if your life depended upon it. Kawabata Yasunari‘s Snow Country is one of these books.
Born in 1899, the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, so the problem is obviously me.
The prose is a stunning collection of scenes, a hundred different ways to describe the snow and the cold and a woman’s face, but I swear I have no idea what the point of this was. A man goes back to visit a geisha he met the year before, and they carry out an extra-conjugal relationship made of broken conversations and fragmented encounters. He never grows, possibly because he’s a man, while she reaches out and withdraws, evolves from a stand-in to a proper geisha, flutters from states of deep reflection to stumbling drunk in his room and speaking nonsense, all while they’re seemingly hunted by two ghosts: a man who died, and whose medical bills she was paying, and the woman who was taking care of him in the end. I swear it seems there’s a plot, but there’s isn’t. There’s nothing to it. Nothing happens and, when it does, the novel is over. Why?
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