NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957. Second hardcover printing. 175pp. Small 8vo. Illustrated paper over boards; black topstain; dust jacket. Light shelfwear at tips; a couple of minor bumps to base of boards. Near fine in a very good jacket, unclipped ("$3.00"), with shallow chipping at head of spine, toning to rear panel and flap edges.
A nice example of the American hardcover issue of one of the most celebrated novels by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature; an elegiac love story set at a remote hot spring village in northern Japan, as translated with an introduction by Edward G. Seidensticker. Kawabata's first book to appear in English translation, Knopf originally issued the book as a paperback in 1956, as noted here on the front jacket flap: "The first experimental edition of Snow Country was issued in a paper binding at $1.25." Apparently emboldened by the book's unexpected success, Knopf quickly issued a hardcover edition, whose jacket repeats the Fumi Komatsu illustration used for the paperback. The present copy is the second hardcover printing (issued in the same month as the first), with illustrated boards reproducing Sesshū Tōyo's 16th century painting View of Amanohashidate. A remarkably uncommon issue of one of the undisputed high points of Japanese modern literature.
