From Publishers Weekly
Critically praised for her remarkable capacity to evoke time and place in her gorgeous novels (Polish concentration camps in Anya; the Vietnam war in Buffalo Afternoon), Schaeffer here transports the reader to medieval Japan in a haunting tale of thwarted love and unsolved mysteries. Lady Utsu, renowned both for her beauty and her cruelty, is the ward of the great Lord Norimasa. While Norimasa has been kind to Utsu, as a test of loyalty he forces her to kill her lover. When Utsu falls in love again, with Norimasa's prot‚g‚, the samurai Matsuhito, she flees the palace. Though they are unaware of the coincidence, Utsu and Matsuhito each adopt a pet fox named after the other, as surrogate for and symbol of their yearning. Their poignant reunion decades later in the snow country, mixing bliss and grief, becomes a transfiguring event. Schaeffer creates an atmosphere as delicate and precise as an etching, yet raw with violence. The story is permeated with cultural details, from palace etiquette to the customs of childbirth. It's a world of extreme gentility and utter barbarity: while the upper classes weave poetry into their formal conversations, peasants are slaughtered like animals, and victorious warlords display heads on spikes. As Utsu and Matsuhito experience passion and grief, the plaintive leitmotif is the fleeting nature of life. The plot doubles back upon itself, as Lady Utsu and Matsuhito recall earlier incidents in memory and dreams. This device adds depth, but it also slows the narrative; readers must be patient. In the end, however, the novel achieves a cumulative, transporting magic.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Why read a historical novel about Japan by a Brooklyn-born Chicago academic when Japan's literature teems with novels and historical chronicles of its own? Why not just settle for the real thing?The short answer is that The Snow Fox turns out to be a spare, subtle, moving love story that builds and sustains its own utterly believable world. And there's a bonus: Despite the cross-cultural leap entailed, that world feels Japanese to its core. Schaeffer's tale of a brooding warlord and a beautiful poet is first and foremost a work of imagination; look to it for traditional literary pleasures rather than for an accurate portrait of feudal Japan. And yet it could be set in no other country -- not because it is full of kimono-clad ladies with six-foot-long hair and fearsome samurai in horns and loincloths (although it is), but because it is infused with that peculiarly Japanese quality of quick-witted, almost self-mocking melancholy. Donald Keene tells a story about the demands of translating Japanese, with its dislike of pronouns and its vagueness about things like singular and plural, definite and indefinite, into English. "When I was translating Midori iro no sutokkingu by Abe Kobo," he writes, "I asked [Abe] whether this should be The Green Stocking or The Green Stockings, but he only smiled and commented that this was my problem, not his." Schaeffer clearly knows enough Japanese to have picked up that beguiling indifference to precision; it is everywhere in The Snow Fox, not just as a matter of grammar but as a philosophical attitude and a narrative procedure."Matsuhito remembered Lady Utsu's polished metal mirror, and how, when you looked into it, only one small part of the oval remained in focus. Everything else distorted or vanished. . . . Lady Utsu feared her mirror. 'Suppose it truly reflects the world as it is?' she asked him. 'Then it is a terrible world.'" 'It is only a mirror,' said Matsuhito." Just so, in the world of this novel, "reality" comes in and out of focus like Mount Fuji vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. It is not clear even to the characters who people are or where they came from; much of the time, it is not clear whether a speaker is dead or alive. Such boundaries, as Abe might have said, are the reader's problem, not the storyteller's. By the same token, as one of the multiple narrators observes, "It does not matter where you begin a story, or in what sequence you tell it -- provided you get to the end, even if that end is the smoke sent up by a funeral pyre." Such blithe vagueness doesn't make for easy reading; I found myself flipping back to the start more than once to get a grip on the plot and later growing impatient with a story that seemed to be going in circles, or nowhere. But stay with it: Its hold tightens.Schaeffer has said that the jumping-off point for The Snow Fox was Akira Kurosawa's film "The Seven Samurai," which is set at the height of the Sengoku Jidai, or Era of the Warring States -- the long, lawless period between the collapse of the Heian golden age at the end of the 12th century and the rise of the great shoguns some 400 years later. "I began to wonder," Schaeffer says of the movie, "what happened to the head samurai after he had helped save the peasant village from marauding bandits. . . . I wanted to know what happened after the film ended."Several years of research later, she had learned enough to shy away from Kurosawa's immediate territory. And so she set her story a couple of centuries earlier -- although the precise time frame is fuzzy -- after the sun has set on Heian and at the dawn of the Sengoku Jidai. She imagined a samurai, Matsuhito, and his relationships with two redoubtable figures: Lord Norimasa, a warlord who adopts him and with whom he battles to restore order to the country, and Lady Utsu, a beautiful poet and Lord Norimasa's ward, with lips "like blood on snow" and a reputation for coldness toward men. Except, of course, toward Matsuhito, who becomes her lover before the two are separated by wars and other turbulence. Only decades later do they find each other -- and a brief, fragile happiness -- in the woods of the northern snow country, where they live with their alter egos, a pair of foxes. And then . . . the funeral pyres.Kurosawa's village, obviously, has receded. In this landscape, a village is useful mainly for Lord Norimasa to torch when he needs light for a battle. Taking turns in the foreground instead are the walled world of the court aristocracy, which lives on, perpetuating the old traditions, while the social order crumbles around it; the lurid world of war; and the natural world, symbolizing transience, "like a beautiful scene painted on silk after it has faded." All are superbly realized. The character of Lady Utsu is based on Ono no Komachi, an actual poet at the 9th-century Heian court and later the subject of several Noh plays whose plots turn on her legendary cruelty to suitors. Several of those legends are woven into the fictional Lady Utsu's story. It is not clear why Schaeffer chose to telescope different historical periods in this way. Perhaps she felt she could hardly imagine a more mesmerizing character; perhaps she felt Komachi's real-life reputation for beauty, wit and elegance would heighten the Heian flavor of her violent feudal setting. (Not to be outdone, the publishers have put a very 19th-century-looking geisha on the jacket cover.)Nevertheless, Lady Utsu is a memorable heroine: smart as a whip, cool, yet vulnerable -- well-matched with the shrewd but pensive Matsuhito. One of the best things in the novel is the deft back-and-forth of the pair's repartee. Despite the obligatory sadness and forays into melodrama, The Snow Fox can also be very amusing.So, no, it's not The Tale of Genji, or even Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa's swashbuckling samurai novel. But I will say this: If you tackle either of those monuments of Japanese literature after reading The Snow Fox, there will be moments in which you can truthfully say, "Ah, yes, I've felt that, seen that, heard that note, before." Not bad for a foreigner. Reviewed by Elizabeth WardCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
In this exhaustively detailed portrait of medieval Japan, the treacherous politics of court life and the way women are both coddled and restricted are a source of great unhappiness for renowned poet Lady Utsu. When the powerful Lord Norimasa insists that Lady Utsu poison the only man she has ever loved because he is a traitor, Lady Utsu is forever changed. Realizing that he has gone too far by forcing her to buy into his brutal version of power politics, Lord Norimasa decides to make amends by setting Lady Utsu up with his faithful sidekick, the samurai Matsuhito. Unexpectedly, the two develop a deep and passionate love for each other and are able to cast off their inhibitions and share their innermost thoughts. Separated by war and palace intrigue, they reconnect decades later, rekindling their feelings in an isolated mountain cabin. The slow pacing and sometimes portentous dialogue will cause some readers to make a quick exit; others, however, will be swept up in Schaeffer's passionate evocation of the war between the sexes. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Publishers Weekly starred review
A haunting tale of thwarted love and unsolved mysteries...achieves a transporting magic.


Alice Hoffman
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is, was, and always will be a wonderful writer.


Lesley Downer, New York Times Book Review
Schaeffer tells her story in epic style....She conjures up a society defined by both exquisite beauty and bloody battles.


Laura Miller, Salon
Love, poetry and severed heads on pikes: A novel with some of the majesty of Cold Mountain.


Book Description
"A spare, subtle, moving love story that builds and sustains its own utterly believable world."—Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World One thousand years ago, chaos loosed itself upon Japan, upending an era in which the arts flourished. At the dawn of 250 years of civil war, in the opulent court of Lord Norimasa, the beautiful but cruel poet Lady Utsu wages war with men's hearts and holds the fearsome lord and his devoted samurai Matsuhito in her thrall. As the two men raze Japan's landscape in futile battles for unity, Utsu falls for Matsuhito even as Lord Norimasa continues to love her. The epic romance of Utsu and Matsuhito resumes itself decades later, when they meet as vagrants so transformed by time that they no longer recognize each other; they are reunited through their mystical connection to a pair of snow foxes that are their only company in the Japanese wilderness. The heartbreaking story of their renewed love is fraught by the Japanese concept of mono no aware—life's ephemeral nature—that weighs on the lovers. Reading group guide included.


About the Author
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's previous novels include Anya, Buffalo Afternoon, and The Madness of a Seduced Woman. She lives in Chicago and Vermont and teaches at the University of Chicago.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Is one's fate created by the people one is lucky or unlucky enough to love? The Snow Fox raises this question as it brings to life three people who existed almost one thousand years ago in Japan. One of them is Lord Norimasa, whose highest love is to reunify his country and restore peace. The second is a member of his court, Lady Utsu, one of the supreme poetic geniuses of her time. She is also a woman renowned as the country's most beautiful woman, as famous for her cruelty as for her beauty and artistry. The third is Matsuhito, a samurai who apprentices himself to Lord Norimasa, and who, in time, becomes a legendary warrior.

When Matsuhito and Lady Utsu fall hopelessly in love, the lives of these three are forever changed. Separated by the warfare ravaging Japan, Matsuhito and Lady Utsu do not meet until both of them have aged so greatly that they no longer recognize each other. But when they do discover each other, their ecstatic and long-delayed reunion is shadowed by the caprices and cruelty of time, the transience of all living things, or what the Japanese call mono no aware.

The Snow Fox not only portrays a great and moving love story but also paints memorable portraits of characters at all levels of society: a man who loves to paint on skin, Shinda the resourceful bandit, the nobleman who freezes to death for love, and the eta, the untouchables who inhabit graveyards and other forbidden places. Last but not least are two remarkable foxes who in their own way, live as meaningful and influential lives as any human being.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Schaeffer tells her story in epic style, as if it were being related by a chronicler contemporary with the events described. Much is not explained, creating the illusion that the knowing reader is also a part of this world. When, for example, Lady Tsukie, Lord Norimasa's wife, has a child, we are expected to take it for granted that archers will twang their bows to keep evil at bay, that exorcists will be summoned. The novel's language is slightly stilted and portentous, like a translation of an ancient text. We see events not directly but from the perspectives of various participants. Everything is described obliquely -- sometimes confusingly -- through dialogue and dreams, memories and thoughts. — Lesley Downer

Publishers Weekly

Critically praised for her remarkable capacity to evoke time and place in her gorgeous novels (Polish concentration camps in Anya; the Vietnam war in Buffalo Afternoon), Schaeffer here transports the reader to medieval Japan in a haunting tale of thwarted love and unsolved mysteries. Lady Utsu, renowned both for her beauty and her cruelty, is the ward of the great Lord Norimasa. While Norimasa has been kind to Utsu, as a test of loyalty he forces her to kill her lover. When Utsu falls in love again, with Norimasa's prot g , the samurai Matsuhito, she flees the palace. Though they are unaware of the coincidence, Utsu and Matsuhito each adopt a pet fox named after the other, as surrogate for and symbol of their yearning. Their poignant reunion decades later in the snow country, mixing bliss and grief, becomes a transfiguring event. Schaeffer creates an atmosphere as delicate and precise as an etching, yet raw with violence. The story is permeated with cultural details, from palace etiquette to the customs of childbirth. It's a world of extreme gentility and utter barbarity: while the upper classes weave poetry into their formal conversations, peasants are slaughtered like animals, and victorious warlords display heads on spikes. As Utsu and Matsuhito experience passion and grief, the plaintive leitmotif is the fleeting nature of life. The plot doubles back upon itself, as Lady Utsu and Matsuhito recall earlier incidents in memory and dreams. This device adds depth, but it also slows the narrative; readers must be patient. In the end, however, the novel achieves a cumulative, transporting magic. Agent, Jean V. Naggar. 6-city author tour. (Feb.) Forecast: This is a perfect dead-of-winter book, and should entice readers with its elegant jacket image of a demure nude. The easy comparison is Memoirs of a Geisha, but Akira Kurosawa's film The Seven Samurai (Schaeffer's original inspiration) is a better reference point. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In 11th-century Japan, two long-lost lovers are brought together again by a pair of snow foxes. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews