Winter Storm Reads: Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney & Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Since the winter storm is keeping us indoors another day, I thought I'd share two books about snow I've read this month. 

Published a year ago this week, Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney is about a couple whose relationship is on the rocks being terrorized by a swirling mass of snow. Really! 

The story alternates between Brian and Holly present and Brian and Holly a year ago before a traumatic, bloody event that left them both, separately and together, changed. In the present narrative, they take a spontaneous vacation to a ski village but are derailed en route by a snow storm that has the power to yank someone out through a car window.  

We also get chapters from the village sheriff's perspective. Up until recently, Kendra felt confident and content, but then her girlfriend left her, two tourists went missing, and now she feels like a failure, stranded in an interior blizzard. 

Kendra, Brian, and Holly will encounter an unexplainable phenomenon before the night is through. 

This is an enjoyable, non-literary, old-fashioned horror story: It is a fun read that is also about the ways we avoid dealing with traumatic events; it isn't a book about TRAUMA dressed in the loose-fitting garb of a "horror" story. It's well-written but not in a way that distracts from the plot. It's got a sizeable cast of characters and they don't all make it, but at the heart of it is Brian and Holly: Will they survive, and if so, will their relationship make it? 

And now for something completely different! The other wintery book I read was Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker. Originally published in three parts over the course of ten years, the final version emerged as a whole in 1947. Snow Country is a melancholy winter poem in short novel form, frank and unromantic. 

"Snow country" refers to the mountainous region on the western coast of Japan known for its heavy snowfall, where pleasure-seekers go to ski, enjoy the hot springs, drink sake, and enjoy the company of geishas. Over the course of three visits to a hot spring resort in a remote mountain village, a married Tokyo idler (Shimamura) becomes intimate with a young geisha, Komako. There is no pretense that theirs will be a lasting love affair. Hot spring geishas aren't known for being particularly well-trained in music, dance, or song. 

The writing is absorbing, occasionally transcendently beautiful, lovely and sad. So much reflection on "wasted effort:" beauty and talent existing in a snowbound, uncultured village. When Shimamura is with Komako, he is reminded of his own futile enjoyments (hiking mountains; an intended self-published book on ballet, an art he's never seen nor wants to). In snow country, it is clear that time just passes, with nothing to show for us having been there but perhaps a series of diaries read over only by their writer, or a fine cotton cloth that will long outlive its anonymous creator. 

I hope everyone is safe and warm, cozy with their pets or other loved ones. 

-Michael G.