The Land of Snow is a love story between a lazy intellectual bourgeois from Tokyo and a geisha from the mountains of northwestern Japan. The hero travels by train, and in the first sentence of the novel, they have just passed through a tunnel and suddenly find themselves in the land of snow.

This area is known as the other side of Japan, and cold winds originating from Siberia traverse it. Thus, we transition from the capital to the strange and wild world of the mountains, from one world to another, into an otherworldly dimension introduced from the very first page with reflections, distant lights, and eyes shining upon glass, forming duplicities with the night landscape.

Kawabata adds additional dimensions and emphasis to the images of beauty and the otherworldly he wishes to create. Light, train, electric, the pupil of her eye, Yokohama, upon a distant glow, the new in the service of beauty. Even violence is just part of a world of contrasts and exists only for a few moments before the galaxy swallows everything within it. Love flickers uncertainly in hearts, eyes, bodies.

Alice in Wonderland meets the Zen of moments, connecting them in a now that has swallowed past and future and wavers between haze and melancholy. The union with nature, with the erotic body, and ultimately with the universe is fateful in its experience and leaves the heroes skinless and without healing. Distance and coldness meet passion and madness, fire consuming everything under the frozen gaze of the galaxy.

The Land of Snow is one of Kawabata’s most important novels (Nobel Prize in Literature 1968) as well as one of the great masterpieces of Japanese literature.