{"product_id":"2026200017543-secondhand-snow-country-a-novel","title":"Snow Country: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: No dust jacket\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: Condition as shown in image\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the frozen highlands of Japan's mountainous interior, a wealthy Tokyo dilettante named Shimamura travels to a remote hot-spring resort, where a chance encounter on a train ignites a melancholy, hopeless affair with a provincial geisha named Komako — a relationship that Snow Country chronicles with devastating emotional precision. Yasunari Kawabata's masterwork, first serialised in Japan between 1935 and 1937 and later published in its complete form in 1948, stands as one of the most luminous achievements in twentieth-century world literature, presenting a meditation on beauty, transience, and the unbridgeable distances between human souls.\n\nKawabata, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 — the first Japanese writer to receive the honour — constructs his prose with the delicate economy of a haiku master, where snowscapes and mirror reflections carry the full weight of longing and loss. The novel argues, in its quiet, inexorable way, that beauty is most keenly felt in the moment of its passing, a philosophy deeply rooted in the Japanese aesthetic of *mono no aware*. Translated into English by the celebrated Edward G. Seidensticker, this edition brings Western readers into intimate contact with a world both utterly foreign and profoundly universal — leaving one to wonder whether Shimamura's obsession is truly with Komako, or with the vanishing beauty of everything he can never possess.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49216205816027,"sku":"2026200017543-SECONDHAND","price":10.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/a0aa10be-0956-49d8-9898-db5cc6445f61.png?v=1788405317","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200017543-secondhand-snow-country-a-novel","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}