Recommendations
Books Like Snow Country
Best books to read after Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Snow Country is Japanese literature at its most distilled — Shimamura's impossible love for Komako expressed in a prose of extraordinary beauty that embodies mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness of transience. If the novel's beauty and its portrait of love as something that cannot be fully held moved you, these books share its concern with impermanence, its interest in the relationship between beauty and loss, and its willingness to leave things unresolved in the way that life leaves things unresolved.
- 1Buy
Thousand Cranes
by Yasunari Kawabata
The essential companion — the tea ceremony and a young man's entanglement with his father's mistress; organized around the same aesthetic of beauty and transience as Snow Country but with the formal beauty of the tea ceremony as its central image; for readers who want more Kawabata after Snow Country
- 2Buy
The Old Capital
by Yasunari Kawabata
The companion in Kawabata's Nobel citation — twin sisters in Kyoto separated at birth; organized around the same bittersweet awareness of transience and beauty as Snow Country but with the grandeur of Kyoto's traditional culture as its backdrop; essential for readers who want to understand the full range of Kawabata's Nobel Prize achievement
- 3Buy
Kokoro
by Natsume Sōseki
The essential Meiji-period companion — the young man and Sensei and the confessional letter; where Kawabata approaches the impossibility of human connection through aesthetic beauty, Sōseki approaches it through the psychology of guilt and the collision of Confucian and Western values; both are essential to understanding what Japanese literature made of the modern experience of isolation
- 4Buy
The Sound of Waves
by Yukio Mishima
Mishima's most sunlit and simple love story — the young fisherman and the wealthy man's daughter on a remote island; the counterpoint to Snow Country's melancholy beauty: where Kawabata's love story is organized around impossibility and distance, Mishima's is organized around simplicity and consummation; reading both gives the range of postwar Japanese literary treatments of romantic love
- 5Buy
The Pillow Book
by Sei Shōnagon
Sei Shōnagon's tenth-century Japanese court diary — the essential predecessor to Snow Country's aesthetic of captured moments; Snow Country's prose owes its sharpness to the tradition of Japanese literature that Sei Shōnagon represents: the aestheticization of the passing moment and the elevation of sensory experience to the level of literary subject
- 6Buy
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
Murakami's most direct love novel — Toru Watanabe's impossible love for Naoko in 1960s Tokyo; where Kawabata's Snow Country approaches love through aesthetic distance and the beauty of the snowy landscape, Murakami's Norwegian Wood approaches it through the directness of teenage grief and the warmth of alternative attachment; both are organized around a love that cannot be resolved or completed
- 7Buy
The Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu
The founding work of Japanese literary culture — Prince Genji's loves and his pursuit of beauty across a court that is always changing; Snow Country is in dialogue with The Tale of Genji's tradition of mono no aware, and Kawabata's writing is shaped by the aesthetic tradition Murasaki Shikibu established
- 8Buy
No Longer Human
by Osamu Dazai
The essential dark counterpart to Snow Country's beauty — Yōzō Ōba's confessional memoir of his inability to feel genuinely human; where Kawabata's Snow Country is organized around beauty and transience, Dazai's No Longer Human is organized around alienation and self-destruction; both are among the most important Japanese novels of the twentieth century and together show the range of what Japanese fiction made of modern alienation
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