Yasunari Kawabata's narrative voice is irresistible. While we highly recommend his novels Beauty and Sadness and Snow Country, his short story collection, First Snow on Fuji, is nearly perfect, like a delicate and beautiful fan from which ever more elegant pictures emerge as it unfolds. His style, influenced as much by avant-garde Western contemporaries like Virginia Woolf as by seventeenth century Haiku masters like Basho, is austere yet highly evocative, with an acute awareness of the natural world and life's transience.

To this haunting novel of wasted love, Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astonishing grasp of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. As he chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, one of Japan's greatest writers creates a work that is dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.