Kawabata Yasunari (1996) Snow Country. Vintage International, New York.
Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country [Yukiguni] is a lyrical tale centring upon the wealthy and aesthetically inverted dilettante Shimamura. In escaping certain mundane realities, Shimamura finds himself in the midst of the Japanese snow country and a strange love affair with the geisha Komako. He meanders the mountainous countryside until, accompanied by the burgeoning realisation of his own lack of human worth, he encounters tragedy. Dotted throughout the book are appearances by the intense, somewhat sexless Youko. Despite the strong imagery and musicality of the novel, it finally rejects otiose aesthetic both structurally and as apologia for Shimamura’s de-humanised sensibilities.
Snow Country utilises aesthetic structures to shape the reader’s responses and, therefore, their conception of the work’s shape. For example, two disparate schematic articles may be juxtaposed to produce spontaneous apprehension. Techniques such as this serve in place of plot to produce either tension or appreciation, as appropriate. Further, in that they de-emphasise any sense of human feeling they serve to identify the reader with the protagonist, for whom aesthetic structure is more significant.
In the novel’s dénouement, extended imagery functions to highlight Shimamura’s realisation of his own human inadequacy. Shimamura and Komako comment upon the beauty of the Milky Way whilst on the way to the site of a devastating fire, where Shimamura experiences this beauty as a violent attack upon his sensibilities that renders him unconscious. Throughout this passage, the Milky Way is first identified with Shimamura’s overriding aesthetic inversion, and then used to render it impotent.
In contrapuntal development, as the novel progresses Komako – initially described as ‘translucent’ and compared to the clarity of mountains – is ‘fleshed out’ in a nearly literal sense (see for example page 138). Increasing emphasis is placed upon her physical presence, the realisation of which discombobulates Shimamura, who begins to sense his own lack of human significance. (In contrast, the character of Youko, with whom Shimamura never achieves any degree of intimacy, is always somewhat translucent, as it is in the novel’s opening passage.)
In short, Komako’s manifestation as a physically real agent catalyses Shimamura’s realisation of his own inability to connect with humanity. Youko, with whom intimacy never imposes this kind of realisation, remains an ideal until Komako finally pronounces her insane, an alternative interpretation of the very qualities that rendered her attractive to Shimamura. This realisation of human inadequacy is accompanied by a rejection – in the form of violent manifestation – of the very aesthetic that Shimamura (and textually the author) has practiced as an alternative to human identification.
Kawabata’s Snow Country has been described as an exercise in the beauty of decay. I disagree. In the final instance, the author proffers a place for human significance amidst otherwise somewhat bloodless aesthetic, fleshes out the disembodied heroine and whacks the self-indulgent protagonist on the head with a stick the size of the Milky Way. A fitting end to a novel by an author with noted Zen sympathies.
