This book was given to me with a simple dedication: “To those who melted the snow.” Since then, it has become one of those books that you never really leave — that live silently in your heart. And I assure you that it will also melt the snow that perhaps you didn’t know you were carrying around with you. The amazing journey you will immerse yourself in, in fact, will not only be within the Japanese world, but of your soul. Short but profound, it will represent the melancholic cuddle you didn’t know you needed until you abandoned yourself to it. It is a short novel, yes, but capable of opening windows onto emotions that seem to belong to a suspended time.
He is Shimamura, a rich married bourgeois from Tokyo, a pretentious and elusive aesthete, a lover of nature and forgotten places where he loves to take refuge to find himself. She is Komako, a young girl with a painful past and a lost gaze, trapped in a life she did not choose, but that she faces with a silent strength and a gaze that does not lie: she works as a geisha in the small mountain village where the story is set.
But this is not her story, nor his. It is the story of two similar souls destined for a passion as moving as it is tragic. Of a whispered love that is never truly put in the foreground, but that is lost in short and heartbreaking dialogues, fleeting encounters, night walks, unspeakable desires of the soul and body.
In the background a slow, muffled, immobile Japan, “of the snows”, far from the chaotic metropolitan frenzy. Description after description, I hope you will be able, like me, to see the natural elements – the slowly falling snow, the crackling of the fire, the sound of footsteps in the night – mixing with those of the human heart until they merge. The characters, in fact, seem perfectly sewn into the landscape that surrounds them: a place of the soul that reflects their restlessness and tenderness.
The writing is delicate and unpretentious, slender, modest, but full of grace. It doesn’t scream, but remains. It’s a bit like what we all need, in the evening, when the body searches for a place to rest. A Japanese classic that was able to lull me in moments of silence, while I could only hear, in the distance, the soft sound of snow.
The beauty of this book is right here: in the perfect balance between the delicacy of gestures and the intensity of feeling, in its ability to suggest, rather than show, and to gracefully evoke what is not said.
It is a book that recalls the great loves that cannot express themselves, or that perhaps, sometimes, do not even need it. How can we not recognize ourselves, after all, in Shimaruma’s need to love, and in Komako’s need to be loved. How can you not feel the looming tragedy and a feeling destined not to be born, not to live, not to be. How can you not recognize the pure and crystalline beauty on which each page is perfectly constructed.
A book to (re)find the desire to escape to worlds and sensations that seem not to exist in space and time. I hope you get lost in these pages as you get lost in fresh snow: on tiptoe, leaving footprints that time will surely erase, but that for a while are all that matters. Let Shimamura and Komako accompany you in their fragile world, and let yourself be lulled by this light and profound story. You arrive in the Land of Snow in silence. But from there, I promise you, it will be difficult to want to go back.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Yasunari Kawabata, Il paese delle nevi, Einaudi, Torino, 1959
Original edition: Yukiguni (雪国), 1935