Snow Country: Kawabata's Echigo-Yuzawa

The novel opens inside a train: the famous first line has it leaving the long tunnel on the border into the snow country, where the night turns white and the train stops at a signal stop. Readers take the tunnel to be the Shimizu Tunnel on the Joetsu Line, then newly built; it opened in 1931 after nine years of construction. On board, Shimamura watches a young woman caring for a sick man. The tunnel is a working railway line, not a sight.

Just past the tunnel the train halts at a signal stop, and the night outside has turned white with snow. Readers identify this stop as Tsuchitaru, which opened in 1931 as a signal stop and lies just outside the tunnel mouth when seen from Tokyo. Kawabata did not like the novel's scenes pinned to specific real places, so this is a reading, not a fact he confirmed.

Location precision: The novel gives no name for the signal stop; Tsuchitaru is a traditional identification, not Kawabata's own.

Shimamura gets off the train at the station for the hot spring, and the sick man and the young woman get off too. Later Komako sees him off at the station when he leaves. In a later afterword Kawabata wrote that the snow country is the Echigo hot spring of Yuzawa. Echigo-Yuzawa Station opened on 1 November 1925, and it is the town's railway stop today.

Location precision: The novel does not name the station; the pin marks the station of the town Kawabata named as the setting.

Visitor guidance: A normal passenger railway station in Yuzawa town.

Shimamura arrives at the onsen inn and has the geisha Komako called to his room; they spend the night together. Kawabata hid the town's name, but he stayed from 1934 until 1937 at the Takahan inn in Yuzawa, now called Yukiguni no Yado Takahan. The inn was rebuilt, yet the room where he is said to have written the novel, is preserved.

Location precision: The novel never names the inn; Takahan is where Kawabata stayed, so it is the likely model, with no pin from a reference.

Walking through the snowy town, Shimamura is invited by Komako up to the attic room of her dance teacher's house. The sick man from the train turns out to be the teacher's son, Yukio. The room is fiction, but the Yukiguni-kan, Yuzawa's history and folklore museum, shows a reconstruction of the room where the geisha who inspired Komako lived, called Komako's Room.

Location precision: Komako's attic is invented; the pin marks the Yukiguni-kan museum, which holds the reconstructed room.

Visitor guidance: Yukiguni-kan museum in Yuzawa town.

At the end of the book a fire breaks out in the town warehouse, which was being used as a cinema. Shimamura and Komako rush there. Kawabata never names the town in the book, yet Yuzawa is where the novel takes place, and he said the blaze in the snow was not made up: it really happened. The pin is left off because the warehouse cannot be placed.

Location precision: The warehouse is not named or located; the area is simply the Yuzawa hot spring town.