Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in the remote hot spring (onsen) town of Yuzawa. (Kawabata did not mention the name of the town in his novel.)

The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo, and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral.

The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, Shimamura, a wealthy loner and self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed to failure. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book.