Snow Country

Beautiful novel. Its easy to see why he was the first Japanese novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). His prose is of the quality that you feel lost in some gorgeous poetic wonderland. Regrettably, while this is still one of my favorites, the translation is not up to par with say Thousand Cranes or others. But even though you can feel some awkwardness in the translation enough of Kawabata’s poetry comes through to make it worth the read.