Cornelis Ouwehand Book order (chronological)

Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress’ rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.

Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura – their love offers no freedom to either of them. Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata's exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and the understated passion of the young Japanese couple.