Snow Country

Shimamura is an artist. He comes to a town buried in snow. What he wants is to pull himself together. There he meets Komako again. Komako is a geisha and they had met on an earlier trip. What is between them looks like love. Komako is the foster daughter of a local family. She is all but engaged to Yukio, the family’s son. But Yukio has consumption and is dying. His sister Yuko is nursing him. Yuko holds it against Komako. Shimamura returns to Tokyo and promises to come back. Trusting that promise, Komako breaks with her patron. Her family loses its house as well. But Shimamura does not keep his word. The film was adapted from the novel of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata. Ryō Ikebe and Keiko Kishi take the leads in Shirō Toyoda’s Japanese film of 1957.