Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
Summary
Shimamura is a wealthy, idle Tokyo man who travels repeatedly across the mountains to a remote hot spring town, drawn back each time to Komako, a local geisha whose devotion to him grows more serious than his own feelings ever quite manage to match. On the train to one of these visits he watches a young woman, Yoko, tending carefully to a sick man, Yukio, a scene he cannot look away from and that keeps returning to him even after he reaches Komako. Kawabata builds the whole relationship between Shimamura and Komako out of small, exact observations, mirrors, insects, the particular cold of the snow country air, rather than out of dramatic incident, so the reader senses the imbalance between them long before either character says so directly.
The moment that exposes it plainly comes when Shimamura, without quite meaning cruelty, calls Komako a good woman rather than a good girl, a small shift in language that tells her, and the reader, exactly how far apart their two versions of the relationship actually are. The novel ends abruptly and violently: a fire breaks out at a former cinema being used as a warehouse, and Yoko, the young woman from the train, falls lifeless from the burning building while Shimamura stands watching the night sky above the flames, the connection between the two women in his life closing on an image neither one of them controls.
Kawabata worked on the novel on and off for more than a decade, revising and adding sections repeatedly before settling its final shape, and that patience shows in prose built almost entirely from fragments of sensation rather than connected explanation. It suits a reader drawn to beauty treated as inseparable from waste and loss, and it rewards close, slow reading over a fast one, since most of what the novel actually says about Shimamura's failure to love Komako properly is said through image rather than through anything a character states outright.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Yasunari Kawabata the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature for narrative mastery that, with great sensibility, expresses the essence of the Japanese mind, making him the first Japanese writer to win the honor. Snow Country, begun in 1934 and revised across more than a decade before reaching its final form in 1948, was the novel most responsible for that recognition, set in the real hot spring town of Yuzawa, where the room Kawabata used while writing has since been preserved as a small museum.
The English translator Edward Seidensticker, whose 1956 version introduced the novel to readers outside Japan, called it perhaps Kawabata's masterpiece, and reviewers in Britain praised him for building a genuinely tender story out of what looked on paper like unpromising material, an unequal love affair in a small provincial town. Kawabata died by gas asphyxiation four years after his Nobel, in 1972, in circumstances his widow and some of his closest friends believed may have been accidental rather than the deliberate suicide it was widely reported to be.