雪国 (Snow Country)

One of my professors sent me a wonderful care package of books including the famous "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata. It's about the region of Japan I live in (in fact my apartment complex is named after his term 'Snow Country'). I got the book around New Years but waited to read it until I started school again so I could read it during my free periods. I started it yesterday and I'm almost finished.

The book has a very interesting story of a man, a geisha, their inner-demons and their relationship in this area of Niigata. Being in this area, reading the book, and having a decent understanding of Japanese culture I'm really amazed by Kawabata's writing. It switches between really human sounding dialogue and really beautiful long poetic passages about the setting. I think I'm in the perfect place to read this book.

This book couldn't have come at a more appropriate time. It is currently snowing unbelievably hard. It switches between heavy but small fluffy flakes of snow falling to windy violent massive chunks of snow falling. The snow in most places has collected and is above my head, many piles of snow from the snowplows and shoveling are around 7 or 8 feet tall. At the parking lot at the local "Walmart"-esque shop here the plowed snow piles are as tall as a house. How it was piled that high I may never know.

Either way, it is definitely 雪国。