4 ideas
Shimamura, a wealthy Tokyo idler who writes about Western ballet without ever having seen one, makes three visits to a snowbound hot-spring town on the Japan Sea coast. There he keeps up an affair with Komako, a young country geisha who loves him openly and keeps a diary and a reading log.
On the opening train Shimamura watches Yoko's face reflected in the dark window, with the evening landscape moving through it, and finds her more beautiful there than he would face to face. The book repeatedly makes people appear most vivid when framed, reflected, or kept at a remove. This suggests that aesthetic pleasure of this kind depends on distance and on not being touched back.
Shimamura judges Komako's disciplined practices as futile: she teaches herself the shamisen from printed scores alone, and she keeps a record of every novel she reads. The verdict shows how an observer who risks nothing can turn another person's sincere labor into a pleasing sadness. It also measures his own emptiness, because his life contains nothing he works at that hard.
In the snow country, women spun and wove chijimi linen crepe through the long winters, and it was then bleached by laying it on the snow in the sun. Shimamura reflects that the finest cloth came from anonymous labor whose makers were long forgotten, while the fabric outlasted them.