“It was, with no attempt at covering itself, the naked heart of a woman calling out to her man.”
It is said the Introduction by the translator Edward G. Seidensticker,
The hot springs, one of which is the locale of Snow Country, also have a peculiarly Japanese significance. The Japanese seldom goes to a hot spring for his health, and he never goes for “the season”, as people once went to Bath or Saratoga. Hey may ski or view maple leaves or cherry blossoms, but his wife is usually not with him. The special delights of the hot spring are for the unacompanied gentleman. No properous hot spring is without its geisha and its compliant hotel maids.
If the hot-spring geisha is not a social outcast, she is perilously near being one. The city geisha may become a celebrated musician or dancer, a political intriguer, even a dispenser of patronage. The hot-spring geisha must go on entertaining week-end guests, and the pretense that she is an artist and not a prostitute is often a thin one indeed. It is true that she sometimes marries an old guest, or persuades him to open a restaurant for her; but the possibility that she will drift from one hot spring to another, more unwanted with each change, makes her a particularly poignant symbol of wasted, decaying beauty.
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