Snow Country

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous first line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country (1948) captures an experience I know well, having travelled many times through this unending passage en route to Niigata’s Naoetsu from Tokyo. I remember the first time, twenty years ago, the blinding daylight as the train reappeared, and out the windows the snow deeper than the average person is tall. In the novel, written in 1935 and later reworked for publication, Shimamura gets off at Echigo-Yuzawa Station; Yuzawa was then a small town where visitors went to enjoy onsen and respite from the capital. He’s a ballet critic (or so he says), and is married, but idles most days away and, after the tunnel, in this world of snow he escapes to, calls upon the services of geisha. To a slight extent he becomes involved in a love triangle with two women who live there, both somewhat provincial and equally mysterious to our protagonist narrator. One is Komako, a geisha who dwells in other people’s hovels and is bent on drinking herself to infirmity, and the other is Yoko, who's nursing a dying man and lives with a shamisen teacher. Just as Shimamura is idle with his time, he’s idle in the sense of doing little to support or encourage those around him. He, the narrator, comes across as almost devoid of empathy, choosing to give us an unsympathetic report on Komako’s gradual spiral and Yoko’s grief. This “snow country” for him is a fantasy world. The women, however much he needs them, are playthings that shine then fall like the diaphanous moths he describes dropping off door screens and other surfaces made to separate. What I particularly liked about the novel was how it challenges the reader. There's an uneasy contrast between Shimamura’s unfeeling nature, revealed through his own narrative, and Kawabata’s poetic prose layered therein. And I found myself trying to draw lines between the author and the protagonist. Shimamura is unlikeable in his idleness but also perceptive, and he recognizes beauty. Or is he? And does he really? Perhaps in this snow country, despite his keen sense of the true world around him, he'd rather wander blind in self-gratifying unreality.

This is one of three novels that landed Kawabata the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968—according to the Nobel website “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” The other two are The Old Capital and Thousand Cranes.

The geisha Matsuei, who Kawabata based Komako on.

Onibaba

Onibaba (鬼婆, 1964) is a Japanese horror film directed by Kaneto Shindo. Set during the aftermath of a fourteenth century civil war near Kyoto, the story focuses on two (nameless) women who kill soldiers for their weapons and gear. They live in a hut surrounded by a seemingly boundless and inescapable sea of tall grass. There’s a deep hole in there too, which is where they drop their stripped victims before trading the booty for millet and the occasional fowl.

When the slovenly Hachi comes back from the war, he’s without Kishi. Kishi was the young woman’s husband and old woman’s son, but he was killed trying to steal food from a bunch of fed-up farmers. Hachi takes a liking to the young woman, and the old woman tries to put a stop to the grimy affaire de coeur that ensues between this bumpkin pair. She fears that if she can’t end it, then the hard-working young girl will take off for good, leaving her to fend for herself and to likely starve. Solution... Wear a devil mask, hide out in the grass at night, and scare the bejeezus out of the girl whenever she slinks off to lay Hachi. And this works fine till the old woman finds herself out in the pouring rain one night and the mask becomes ruinously affixed to her face.

This is a horror film, but not because anything in it is actually supernatural. We always know it’s the baba pretending to be the oni, that it’s not a real devil. What's unsettling is the photography, especially the shots of the never-ending grass they live in, and the hole, which for the first half of the film appears to be bottomless (unfortunately the narrative didn’t allow for it to be that way). Also the poverty and ignorance of the characters is disturbing and a horror in itself. All in all, I thought it was a good film, and memorable, but not one of the Japanese greats of the genre.

The Human Chair

"The Human Chair" (人間椅子, 1925) by Edogawa Rampo isn't so much a scary tale as it is a deviant's disturbing fantasy come to life. An ugly furniture maker crafts a chair into which he can slip to sit unbeknownst to those (mostly women) sitting atop him. You can hear the wheels turning in Rampo's head as you read this; everything you might want to know about holing up in a chair is covered here. It's a fun story written in a serious tone. It also embraces that typically Japanese form of horror that's rooted half in the quotidian and half in the frightfully bizarre. Put another way, Eugene Thacker, writing for The Japan Times, described it as "exemplary of a particular trope in Japanese horror where an innocuous, everyday event sends a character chasing a single idea — methodically, bit by bit — to its logical and terrifying conclusion."