Let’s talk about traveling inward while reading. If you are looking for sweeping, epic novels that cover entire eras, periods or timeframes, well, keep looking. Yasunari Kawabata is all about small. These novels, “The Master of Go,” and “Snow Country,” are about life’s more diminutive encounters, but don’t let that fool you. What he does with these small encounters reminds us of the many, many layers of life we often overlook in our haste, denial, and thirst for the new.
The Master of Go chronicles an epic battle between the aging master and the young challenger. Waged over months and in various locations, the book is detailed in it’s explanation of Go, and what this game does to human beings. I’m a Go fan, so this book made sense to me, but if you would rather play beer pong you might want to skip this one.
Snow Country, considered by many to the Nobel-Prize winning author’s masterpiece tells the story of a wealthy man from Tokyo and his encounter with a geisha at a small mountain town hot spring. This is a story of two people with no real shot, doomed you might even say. A sad book but one that touches on class, desperation and astounding winters of Northern Japan. I enjoyed this book quite a lot. Also know, these books can be read in about two hours. (2hrs each)
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This, from a Goodreads reviewer: “Kawabata paints his story rather than writing it. He is an extremely punctilious imagist who uses his brush with ruthless suavity. Shorts sentences that never falter but flow in a torrent of the simple and the quotidian transformed into pearls of absolute beauty.” You have to stop these book recommendations, Milnor, I’m already over my book budget for this month.
Author
That’s pretty solid. I think he would be difficult for anyone who has attention problems, or those who fast forward through movies and shows.
I’ve read Snow Country many times over. It’s wonderful.
I’m in snow country right now – slap bang in the middle of Hokkaido – but to escape the summer heat an humidity of Nagoya.
Author
We won’t get there on this trip, but Hokkaido has been on my list for several decades.