[The] early loss of [Kawabata's] parents seems responsible for the unique quality which one perceives in his life and work—a peculiar tension between life and death, detachment and attachment, the abstract and sensuous, whence derives a very special awareness of beauty bordering on sorrow….

[The] uniqueness of Kawabata's style is not its imitation of European modernism but rather its use of quintessentially Japanese poetic sensibility in the once prosaic genre of the novel. (p. 123)

Snow Country comprises a series of episodes, each of which evinces very concisely Kawabata's refined sensibility.

Despite [its] process of composition, Snow Country has a coherent structure. Shimamura, a married man with no particular profession, is attracted to two different types of women in the snow country of north-western Japan. Yōko is intangible or inaccessible to Shimamura, and in this respect an extension of Kawabata's famous Izu dancer (The Izu Dancer [Izu...