Snow Country

Kawabata Yasunari / Lin ShaohuaQingdao Publishing House · ChinaFeb 2023

Rating 4.8
Word count
109K words
Chapters
10
ISBN
9787573604903

Tags

Foreign Literature Emotional ConflictBeauty of SorrowBeauty of PurityLove and ReasonPsychological NuanceBeauty of the VoidAesthetic NarrativePost-War LiteratureJapanese AestheticsSnowy Landscape

Summary

This edition brings together two of Kawabata Yasunari's representative works: Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. Snow Country, his crowning achievement, portrays a beauty of emptiness, purity, and sorrow carried to its utmost, stirring the heart while leaving an ineffable melancholy. Thousand Cranes depicts the conflict between love and reason, with Japanese scenery and psychology rendered in exquisite detail; between the lines, one seems to see pure white cranes dancing in the glow of sunset.

Editor's review

Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is the key work that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature and a landmark in the history of Japanese literature. Set in a hot-spring resort in the snow country of northern Japan, the novel weaves a picture of beauty steeped in emptiness and futility through the subtle emotional entanglement between the dance researcher Shimamura, the geisha Komako, and the young girl Yoko. This translation, published by Qingdao Publishing House, stands out for its fidelity to the original language: it preserves the distinctive yugen and mono no aware aesthetics of Kawabata's prose while also attending to the reading rhythm of Chinese readers.

The novel's opening line—'The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country'—has become a literary classic; it not only draws back the curtain on a geographical space but also hints at the protagonist's journey from the real world into a spiritual pure land. Kawabata depicts the snow country scenery with an exquisitely delicate touch—blanketing snow, cold moonlight, hot-spring mist—and these natural scenes are not merely background but projections of the characters' inner states. Komako's devotion to love carries the tragic grandeur of a moth drawn to flame, while Yoko, pure and fleeting as a sprite of the snow country, forms a moving contrast with her.

What is most worth savouring in this work is its aesthetics of 'ma': the silence between lines of dialogue, the pauses between actions, the distance between feelings. Kawabata does not state his characters' inner lives directly; instead, he lets readers feel that profound loneliness and emptiness for themselves through the accumulation of detail. When reading, it is advisable to slow down and feel the rhythm flowing through the text, as if appreciating a scroll painting slowly unrolling. For modern readers, Snow Country offers a spiritual refuge against clamour—in an age of rapid consumption, literature that requires quiet contemplation seems all the more precious.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read in a quiet environment, ideally accompanied by soft traditional Japanese music
  2. Familiarise yourself with Japanese aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware and yugen to better grasp the deeper meaning of the text
  3. Pause when you reach passages of landscape description and build the visual imagery of the snow country in your mind

About the publisher

Qingdao Publishing House China · Founded in 1987

Founded in 1987, Qingdao Publishing House has long focused on education, science and technology, children's books, and lifestyle titles, while steadily publishing classical and foreign literature. Its 827 titles in the catalog reflect a balance between making classics widely accessible and serving young readers. They include the four great classics of Chinese literature—Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Journey to the West—as well as foreign literary translations such as Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book, works associated with Zhou Zuoren, and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. The press also offers a color-illustrated series of recommended classics for primary and secondary school Chinese curriculum reading, using pictures and text to support student readers. Its common categories cover classical literature, essays and miscellaneous writings, folk literature, and foreign literature, with authors including Luo Guanzhong, Shi Nai'an, Cao Xueqin, Gao E, Wu Cheng'en, Sei Shōnagon, Zhou Zuoren, and Victor Hugo. Public information is limited, so this profile emphasizes the publishing directions shown by the catalog.

Contents

  1. 版权信息
  2. 译序
  3. 雪国1
  4. 雪国2
  5. 千鹤
  6. 千鹤
  7. 林间夕阳
  8. 志野彩瓷
  9. 母亲的口红
  10. 双重星

FAQ

Why did Snow Country win the Nobel Prize in Literature? The committee particularly praised Yasunari Kawabata for 'expressing the essence of the Japanese mind with great sensitivity.' He fused Eastern aesthetics with modern novelistic technique to create a unique literary world. The capture of fleeting beauty and the profound insight into the emptiness of life in Snow Country represent the height of Japanese literature.
What distinguishes this edition from other translations? This translation from Qingdao Publishing House strikes a good balance between scholarly rigour and literary quality. While preserving the poetry of the original, the translator provides appropriate annotations for culture-specific concepts, so that Chinese readers can appreciate the spirit of the work without being hindered by cultural gaps.
How should the theme of 'emptiness' in the novel be understood? The emptiness in Kawabata's writing is not a negative void but an aestheticised state of being. It is embodied in the characters' emotions, which they invest in despite knowing them to be futile, and in the fate of beautiful things that fade in an instant. This sense of emptiness is continuous with the traditional Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware—a profound recognition of the beauty of life's fragility.

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About the author

Kawabata Yasunari Author · Japan · 1899–1972

Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was a Japanese novelist and a leading figure of the New Sensationist school, born in Osaka. A prolific writer, he is represented on this site by 147 works, spanning essays and miscellaneous prose as well as foreign literature. His representative works include The Izu Dancer, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital; Snow Country in particular exists in multiple editions and translations, a sign of its wide circulation. Kawabata is known for his delicate prose, which interweaves human emotion with natural scenery to express the spiritual character of the Japanese people, and often conveys a sense of the beauty of impermanence in life and death. In 1968 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, an important landmark in the global recognition of Japanese literature; he died in 1972. Beyond his novels, his essays and miscellaneous writings also deserve attention.

Lin Shaohua Author · Chinese · 1952

Lin Shaohua, born in 1952 in Jiutai, Jilin, with ancestral roots in Penglai, Shandong, is a renowned Chinese literary translator and essayist who previously served as a professor at the College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China. Since translating Norwegian Wood in 1989, he has devoted himself to introducing Japanese literature to Chinese readers, translating more than forty works by Haruki Murakami as well as notable works by Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Yasunari Kawabata. His fluent and nuanced translations have won him a wide readership in the Chinese-speaking world and have profoundly influenced the reception of Murakami and modern Japanese literature in China. In 2018, he received the Japanese Foreign Minister's Commendation. His translations span novels, essays, and interview collections, with representative works including Snow Country, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kokoro, The Setting Sun, and The Izu Dancer.