Ice Castle

The book is "The Ice Castle" (2022/originally published in 1963) by Taliai Vesos and translated by Asada Chie and Anne-Lande Peters.

A rural town in Norway is cut off by snow. An 11-year-old girl named Sis transfers to the school she attends, and Ung, a girl of the same age, transfers to the school. The two girls hesitantly grow closer, and are bound by a fateful bond. Each with their own thoughts in their hearts, they set out for a mysterious "ice castle" at the foot of a waterfall deep in the forest. This is one of Vesos's masterpieces, a fantastical and symbolic portrayal of the exchange of souls, loneliness, and rebirth from loss, all in his exceptionally refined writing style.

Norwegian literature, which is strongly influenced by the local climate, poetically expresses the snowy serenity of nature, unlike the fierceness of Japanese nature. The bindings of the Penguin Classics books are beautiful, but the bindings of the Kokusho Kankokai books also remind me of fairy tales I read a long time ago (Ammel).