First snow on Fuji
Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Michael Emmerich
When First Snow on Fuji appeared in 1958, Yasunari Kawabata was
beginning to attract the international attention that would lead, ten years
later, to his being awarded the Nobel Prize. Since 1968 Kawabata’s
reputation as one of the stylistically influential and revered figures in world
literature has continued to grow as new generations are introduced to the
apparent simplicity of this most masterful of storytellers.
Selected by Kawabata himself and appearing in English for the first time
in this faithful and nuanced translation by Michael Emmerich, these stories
encompass a Shakespearean range of mood and theme. Several emerge
from one character’s haiku-like perception—a row of trees or the shape of a
lover’s ear—images that then resonate effortlessly through the narrative’s
subtle layers in what is recognized as a hallmark of Kawabata’s clean and
innovative style.
In the title story, a man and woman, long separated by war and her
unhappy marriage, rendezvous for one tense and tender night in which they
discover precisely what time can ravage and what it can preserve. In “This
Country, That Country” a housewife’s astonishing discovery that “two
women exist within her”—one in the arms of her husband, the other in the
embrace of her lover—gives life to a lurking desire for a third man and the
possibility of a third self. And in “Silence,” perhaps the most sundering tale
in this collection, Emmerich finds an eerie foreshadowing in Kawabata’s
silent end, when he committed suicide in 1972, leaving no note, and was
quoted in his obituary: “A silent death is an endless word.” “Silence” is an
existentialist ghost story, in which the lives of a mute and dying novelist
and his devoted daughter are juxtaposed to the spirit who rides in taxis and
