Snow Country

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous opening line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country (1948) captures an experience I know well, having traveled many times through that seemingly endless passage on the way from Tokyo to Naoetsu in Niigata. I remember the first time, twenty years ago, the blinding daylight as the train emerged, and the snow outside the windows piled higher than a person’s height. 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 escape the capital. He is a ballet critic, or so he claims, and though married, he idles his days away. In this world of snow, he seeks out geisha.

He becomes involved in a kind of love triangle with two women who live there, both somewhat provincial and equally elusive to him as narrator. One is Komako, a geisha who lodges in others’ homes and seems bent on drinking herself into decline. The other is Yoko, who is nursing a dying man and lives with a shamisen teacher. Just as Shimamura is idle with his time, he is also idle in the sense that he does little to support or encourage those around him. As narrator, he comes across as almost devoid of empathy, offering a detached account of Komako’s gradual spiral and Yoko’s grief.

For Shimamura, this “snow country” becomes a kind of fantasy. The women, however much he depends on them, are like playthings that flare briefly and fade, like the delicate moths he describes drifting from door screens and other dividing surfaces. What I particularly appreciated about the novel is the way it unsettles the reader. There is an uneasy contrast between Shimamura’s emotional detachment, revealed through his own narration, and Kawabata’s lyrical prose. I found myself trying to trace the line between author and protagonist. Shimamura is unlikeable in his idleness, yet perceptive, capable of recognizing beauty. Or is he? And does he really? Perhaps in this snow country, despite his awareness of the world around him, he prefers to wander in a kind of self-indulgent unreality.

This is one of three novels that contributed to Kawabata’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, awarded, 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.