Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1956)

The train comes out of the long tunnel into the snow country, and the earth lies white under the night sky. A dilettante from Tokyo, Shimamura, watches a girl's face float in the dark train window, a far-off light flaring for an instant inside her eye, and never quite recovers from the beauty of something he cannot keep. In a hot-spring town buried in snow he takes up with Komako, a geisha who loves him with a fierceness that has nowhere to go, who keeps a diary no one will read and studies for a life that will not come. Kawabata names such devotion wasted effort, and makes the waste unbearably lovely: a woman pouring everything into a man too cool to be warmed, in a place so white and silent it seems to be erasing them both. Few books have wrung so much tenderness from futility, or left a love this whole and this hopeless glittering in the snow.