Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata was first published by Iwanami Shoten Publishing in 1948 and in substantially revised form in 1948. The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1956 and translated by Edward Seidensticker. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of wasted love and the transient nature of beauty.
The novel follows Shimamura, a wealthy, detached dilettante from Tokyo who specializes in the study of Western ballet (which he has never actually seen). He travels to a remote hot-spring town in the mountains of Niigata to visit Komako, a rural geisha.
Over the course of three visits spanning several years, their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of heavy snow and isolation. While Komako falls deeply and desperately in love with him, Shimamura is emotionally “numb,” viewing her passion with the same detached aestheticism he applies to art. The narrative is less about plot and more about mood, atmosphere, and the fleeting moments of human connection, much like a painting by Monet.
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| Kawabata at his home in Kamakura |
While I was halfway through reading this fascinating, poetic novel, I attended a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and was struck by how similar the world of the play is very much the world of Snow Country. Plotless, almost floating movement of characters who withhold so much of themselves from others and fabricate stories to satisfy their desire to be noticed (and loved). The futility and irony of Chekhov are clearly part of Snow Country.
This seemingly random series of events that occur in Snow Country is combined with glorious and poetic descriptions of nature (above all, the cold and snow). The novel is set in a remote hot-spring (onsen) town in the Niigata Prefecture of Japan. Some winters receive over 18 feet of snow in a year.
Seidensticker’s translation really shines here when the author is writing about nature and the simple beauty of the sky, wind, and snow. I don’t know Japanese, but the English here is simply wonderful.
“From behind the rock, the cedars threw up their trunks in perfectly straight lines. so high that he could only see the tops by arching his back. The dark needles blocked out the sky, and the stillness seemed to be singing quietly”
Kawabata’s prose is often compared to Haiku. He focuses on sharp, sensory details like the sound of a kettle whistling, the reflection of a girl’s face in a train window against the darkening landscape, and the coldness of a hand, and the brilliantly clear view of the Milky Way in the sky (the country has no city lights to obscure the view) plays an important part in the finale of the novel. These fragments build a vivid, dreamlike world, but they also intentionally leave gaps, requiring the reader to “feel” the story rather than just track the events.
Snow Country requires patient reading. Readers who are plot-oriented will find this slow-going and may miss the entire point of the novel. I often found myself frustrated with the main character, Shimamura, for his inability to empathize with Komoko's suffering, who is deeply in love with him. And the female characters are seen through Shimamura’s gaze not as people, but as objects for his aesthetic pleasure. This will be difficult for modern readers to accept and perhaps dates Snow Country a bit. I fantasized at one point while reading yet another hysterical outburst from Komoko about what it would be like if the novel had been written from her point of view.
The pacing in Snow Country can feel episodic. It lacks a traditional “climax” in the Western sense, ending instead on a sudden, surreal, and ambiguous image of a fire in the village. Oh, but that ending scene is magnificent. The last line of the novel is one of the most perfect endings I have ever read in a novel.
Snow Country is a powerful, dark, and poetic story of love, landscape, and fleeting moments of people connecting and disconnecting. I loved the novel and urge you to read it. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968, the first Japanese person to do so.
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Notes
Very honest review by Marion Hill that influenced my understanding of Snow Country
Another fine review at Japan Powered.
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