Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (1948) is the essential Niigata read. Set in an unnamed hot-spring village in the snowy Echigo mountains — widely identified as Yuzawa — it follows an affair between a wealthy Tokyo man and a geisha over several winter visits. The prose evokes the buried landscape, the isolation, and the particular sadness of the snow country in a way that makes the Niigata mountains feel profoundly different from any other place in Japan. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize partly on the strength of this novel.
The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1948) is set in Osaka, not Niigata, but its obsession with traditional Japan under pressure from modernity captures the same cultural landscape that produced Niigata's rice, sake, and Noh traditions. Read it on the Shinkansen from Tokyo.