It goes:

The TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky.

It just does not work. I know this is not a literature board, but let me just lay out the original order of Japanese sentences:

"Country boarder's long tunnel through The Snow Country it was. Night's bottom white became."

Kawabata took 13 years to write this book, revising sentences including this one. The sentences are very unusual even in Japanese, and so beautiful, thus it was so striking to the readers that it instantly became the most famous phrase in Japanese literature. The English translation above has no trace of this feature.

BTW, I found the actual modern day picture of the tunnel:





The following is the shrine depicted in the novel:







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