ABSTRACT
My initial impression of Japanese literature, hastily made in my teens after I
finished Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country in Okinawa, where I was born
and lived for twenty years, was that it was exotic. This response to the novel
is by no means unique; yet, unlike those for whom the allure of the geisha
Komako makes the work linger on in the mind, it was the snow, unheard of
in Okinawa, which beguiled me. Accustomed as I was to a subtropical
island, far removed from the urban centers of Japan that serve as the setting
for so much of the nation’s imaginative fiction, the Japanese literature that I, a Cold War spy kid, first read in Okinawa struck me as doubly foreign.
That is, the foreignness of Snow Country stemmed both from its being a
Japanese novel and from the fact that it diverged so radically from the
landscape of Okinawa, my childhood home and the only Japan I knew.
