snow country

Everything is broken to little bits.^[i]

           dramatis personae
          Komiko – geisha, lover to Shimamura
          Yoko – village girl, carer to Yukio
          Shimamura – dilettante from Tokyo
          Yukio – ailing village boy

Summer snow / in medias res

The source of light is everywhere. As he walks over the glistening snow, Shimamura’s shadow neither precedes nor follows him; he is simply stationed in the light, and has visited the Border Range before. The sound of the train that delivers him to the remote mountainous region, on the other hand, arrives before him and lingers after the train departs. Such, Kawabata surmises, is our perspective of happenstance: everywhere arrival and departure, distance looks our way. In the novel, joyous local children are depicted parabolically leaping from high balconies to end spreadeagled in soft snow, as if onto mattresses—foreshadowing, as they do so, the fall of our Yoko, who near the end of the novel tumbles to land ‘quite horizontal’, face upward, upon an absolving sheet of snow—a forlorn figure. Neither her abrupt end nor the expedience of the novel can be satisfactorily explained. For his part, Shimamura, returning to the snow country to resume an affair with his lover Komiko, now a geisha, before disembarkation has already caught a premonitory glimpse of the untainted Yoko, reflected in a patch of glass he has just wiped clear. Immediately he imbibes her as a revelation. As things proceed, we find him suspended between ‘the woman his hand remembered [Komiko] and the woman [Yoko] in whose eye the mountain light had glowed.’ Desire, for Shimamura, nourishes the flame in which it burns: ‘Ah, [Komiko] is in love with me—but he was annoyed with himself for the thought’. When it is time to depart, the snow has melted ‘a great deal’ and a further return is vouchsafed. Retribution is the prerogative of the gods.

Autumn snow / fulcrum

‘There’s no one here who can teach me’, remarks Komiko, plucking the samisen and delicately singing to Shimamura. It is she who, shrouded in her blue cape at the station, had awaited the return of her dying fiancé, the homebound Yukio. While his affections remain quite unknown throughout, accompanying him on the same train are his ‘nurse’ Yoko and, across the aisle, the ’lover’ Shimamura. Quickly, this tableau of strangers resolves upon common 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 Komiko belongs to the same hand that clears the glass to reveal the faultless Yoko. Their bodies converge—’her high, thin nose, a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches’. The tall, straight cedars shrouded in snow are ‘a terrible weapon for some god’; while below, sparse green onions continue to decorate the side of the path. Whereas vertical and horizontal axes never align, they do intersect and portend everything known. For Shimamura, abnegation beckons: ‘there was nothing for him to do but give himself up to the current, to the pleasure of being swept off wherever Komiko would take him’. ‘You’re laughing at me’, she complains, foreseeing her own fate, and she exhorts him to ‘try seducing her too before you answer my question’. It is ultimately Yoko’s eyes on which Shimamura ‘impales’, and to which he capitulates: ‘He was sure that Yoko’s eyes, for all their innocence, could send a probing light to the heart of these matters, and he felt drawn to her too’.^[ii]

Winter snow / clemency

Returning yet again, Shimamura’s perspective bifurcates, having missed the February children’s ‘bird-chasing festival’, and imperilling the two women’s lives: ‘he has come three times in less than two years, and on each new visit he had found Komiko’s life changed’. It is his own conceit that is put on display.^[iii] And, oddly peripheral, it is the nondescript Yoko, in her woollen kimono and ‘rough russet and black striped’ mountain trousers, who proves ultimately elusive. Shimamura, who we learn early in the novel admires Occidental ballet performance at which he can never be present, is ‘haunted’ by her soft voice and ‘clean’ demeanour, ‘so beautiful that it was almost sad’. Even after he leaves the house—‘inexpressible beauty made his heart rise when, the night before, that light off in the mountains had passed across the girl’s face in the train window and lighted her eye for a moment’. The light in our eyes, we discover, governs 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, ‘he saw the figure as a phantasm from an unreal world’, thinking this metamorphosis ‘a sacrifice, or [Komiko’s] punishment’. All in all, beauty swallows the lives of the broken-hearted, and the ultimate roar belongs to this immaterial possession that is Shimamura, on the final page, ‘as he caught his footing again, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar’. The periphery, we realise, occupies everything.

Moralitas

The first notes opened a transparent emptiness deep in his entrails and in the emptiness the sound of the samisen reverberated.

notes

[i] Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, 1937/57. The text is a distillation of the novel into a three-act morality play.

[ii] ‘Shimamura ‘was translating Valery and Alain, the 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’.

[iii] The process used in making Chijimi linen, painstakingly manufactured and long-wearing, is recounted in detail. Reflects Shimamura, ‘But his love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi’. The cloth bears the mark of the unobtainable memorabilia in his life.