Takahan — the inn of ‘Yukiguni’

photo by Syced · CC0

photo by Syced · CC0

In the ‘Kasuminoma’ room, now a literary museum, Kawabata wrote ‘Snow Country’.

On a rise above Echigo-Yuzawa, the inn preserves the ‘Kasuminoma’ room (now a hall of the literary museum devoted to the writer) where Kawabata Yasunari stayed and wrote ‘Snow Country’ (雪国), the novel that would earn him the 1968 Nobel Prize and that opens with the very railway tunnel leading to this valley. The inn's spring, ‘Tamago no Yu’, is the same one that, according to local tradition, has been heating the water for over 900 years.

Echigo-Yuzawa, now the terminus of the Jōetsu Shinkansen, is the hot-spring resort that opens ‘Snow Country’ by Kawabata Yasunari, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968: the Takahan inn, where the writer stayed while writing it, has kept the ‘Kasuminoma’ room and set up a small literary museum there, visible from the rise on which the inn stands.

ℹ️ Address: 新潟県南魚沼郡湯沢町湯沢, Yumoto/Yuzawa area. It is not confirmed that the room and the literary museum can be visited without staying the night: contact the inn before your visit.

🚉 Gala-Yuzawa · 10 min walk

Sources: jtb.co.jp

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