snow country
‘Everything is broken to little bits’, echoed Shimamura.[i]
dramatis personae
Komako — geisha, lover to Shimamura
Yoko — village girl, carer to Yukio
Shimamura — dilettante from Tokyo
Yukio — ailing village lad
1. winter / in medias res
The source of light is everywhere. Walking over the glistening snow, Shimamura’s shadow neither precedes nor follows him; he is simply stationed in the light, and he has visited the Border Range before. Such, Kawabata surmises, is happenstance: everywhere arrival and departure, distance looks our way. Halfway through the novel, naked children are seen gleefully leaping from their second-floor dormitory to disappear into deep, soft snow. Doing so, they foreshadow the climactic late fall from her balcony of our heroine Yoko, when she tumbles to end ‘quite horizontal’, face upward, on hardened snow. Neither her demise nor the contribution expedience makes to the novel is ever satisfactorily explained. Such is caprice. For his part, Shimamura returns to resume an affair started on his previous visit with young Komako, now a geisha. Remembering her very carnality, he catches a first glimpse of the untainted Yoko, a fellow passenger on the same train, reflected in the glass he has just wiped clear. He imbibes her as a revelation. As things proceed, his affections are suspended between ‘the woman his hand remembered and the woman in whose eye that mountain light had glowed’. Desire, for Shimamura, burns ceaselessly: ‘Ah, [Komako] is in love with me—but he was annoyed with himself for the thought’. When it comes time to depart again, the snow has ‘melted a good deal’, and a further return is vouchsafed. For Kawabata, retribution is the gods’ prerogative.
2. spring / fulcrum
‘There’s no one here who can teach me,’ remarks Komako, plucking the samisen and singing delicately to Shimamura. It is she who, shrouded in ‘a dark-blue cape’, had been waiting at the station for the return of her fiancé, the ailing Yukio. Accompanying him on the train are his ‘nurse’ Yoko and, across the aisle, our ‘lover’ Shimamura. Quickly, the tableau of strangers brought together resolves on a pathway to desolation: two women, two loves, two deaths. A loves B who loves A and C who loves D who is loved by A. The forefinger with which Shimamura lingeringly remembers Komako belongs to the same hand that reveals the faultless Yoko. Their two bodies converge—her ‘high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches’. Tall, straight cedars now ‘make a terrible weapon for some god’; and later, we notice sparse clusters of ‘green onions in the garden patches […] not yet buried in snow’. We understand that vertical and horizontal lines may never form an alignment, yet they do intersect and at that point portend everything to be known. For Shimamura, abandonment beckons: ‘there was nothing for him to do but give himself up to the current, to the pleasure of being swept off wherever Komako would take him’. ‘You’re laughing at me’, she complains, foreseeing her own fate, and exhorts him to ‘try seducing her too before you answer my question’. Ultimately it is indeed Yoko on whom Shimamura’s life ‘impales’, and he capitulates: ‘He was sure that Yoko’s eyes, for all their innocence, could send a probing light to the heart of these matters’.[ii]
3. autumn / clemency
Having missed out on the children’s ‘bird-chasing festival’ and imperilling the lives of both women, Shimamura returns again: ‘he had come three times in less than two years, and on each new visit he had found Komako’s life changed’. It is his own conceit that bedevils him.[iii] And, strangely peripheral as she is for much of the narrative, it is nondescript Yoko, dressed in woollen kimono and mountain trousers of ‘rough russet and black stripes’, who proves in the end the one desired but unattainable. Shimamura, an admirer and critic of Occidental ballet performance at which he is never physically present, is ‘haunted’ by Yoko’s soft voice and ‘clear’ demeanour — ‘so beautiful that it was almost sad’. After he leaves the house, he recalls the ‘inexpressible beauty [that] made his heart rise when, the night before, that light off in the mountains had passed across the girl’s face’. The light in our eyes, Kawabata attests, determines what we see. ‘The moonlight, so bright that the furrows in the woman’s ear were clearly shadowed, struck deep into the room and seemed to turn the mats on the floor a chilly green’. When Yoko, an icon like Icarus, falls from the sky, it is Shimamura who sees ‘the figure as a phantasm from an unreal world’, thinking this metamorphosis a ‘sacrifice, or [Komako’s] punishment’. It is she who has become increasingly less mattering. Yoko is dead. Beauty swallows the broken-hearted, and the final triumphant roar belongs to an upheaval that, on the closing page, engulfs Shimamura… ‘as he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar’. The periphery, we realise, occupies every cranny.
moralitas
‘The first notes opened a transparent emptiness deep in his entrails, and in the emptiness the sound of the samisen reverberated’.[iv]
notes
[i] Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country (Charles E. Tuttle, 1957), 118. The novel is adapted into a three-act morality play.
[ii] Shimamura was ‘translating Valéry and Alain, and French treatises on the dance from the golden age of the Russian ballet. He meant to bring them out in a small luxury edition at his own expense’, 131.
[iii] The process used in making Chijimi linen, painstakingly manufactured and long wearing, is recounted in detail. Reflects Shimamura, ‘But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi’, 154.
[iv] Snow Country, 71.