"Snow Country" is Kawabata's best-known work and perhaps the best entry point into his style, aesthetics and philosophy. The haiku-like writing, the elegance of minimalism, the imagery evoked by language, the emotion implied within - the famous opening line epitomises it all: 国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。夜の底が白くなった。信号所に汽車が止まった。(Loosely translated as: "Crossing the border through a long tunnel comes the snow country. Under the night sky everything is white. The train stops at the traffic lights.") I don't think anyone who has read the book can ever forget the sensuous, even erotic, opening and the celestial ending. Telling the story of the fruitless love between the metropolitan protagonist and a provincial geisha, this masterpiece is the perfect illustration for the Japanese aesthetics of "mono no aware" (物の哀れ), which conjures up the sort of spiritual and transcendental beauty that could only be felt through the sense of loss and natural passing of things - because existence is impermanent, any effort to attempt is, by nature, in vain. Despite the eventual fruitlessness, the effort validates human existence and therefore constitutes beauty, however ephemeral it might be. That justifies the obsession of "pointless" activities, such as impossible love, and therefore necessitates sadness and the lack of definite resolution. The remote desolation of the setting augments the emotional impact. The fullness from emptiness lingers on and echoes days after you close the book and it is this fascinating feeling that encourages me to read all of Kawabata's output.
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