"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country."
Few opening lines in the canon of domestic literature match that of Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country" in terms of fame. Pretty much every Japanese person knows it by heart having memorized it in high school, despite not being able to recount the plot.
"Snow Country" is set in the mountains of Niigata, near Echigo-Yuzawa Onsen, today an hour by shinkansen from Tokyo but a much longer journey in 1935, when the novel was written. In it we follow married ballet critic Shimamura, torn in a love triangle between a geisha (Komako) and a shamisen teacher (Yoko). At that time Echigo-Yuzawa Onsen was just a hot-spring resort, but today it also houses the biggest ski resort accessible for daytrips from the capital.