Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
Published by Charles E. Tuttle (US) and Secker & Warburg (UK), 1957, with many subsequent editions
From reviews and commentaries:
• London Times, July4,1957:
In Snow Country Shimamura, a rich Tokyo dilettante, leaves his wife behind him when he comes to the hot-spring village in the mountains where he meets a geisha girl, Komako, who falls in love with him. The episode is presented by the author with some of the clarity and charm of a Japanese print. He has fashioned an idyll out of unpromising material. Shimamura is a cold sensualist Komako, impulsive, warm- hearted, sometimes drunk, and clearly on the way to disaster, is a tragic figure hardly aware that she will always be fated to live in a seedy and almost farcical world. Mr. Kawabata’s mountain village in all the beauty of the changing seasons is a poet’s vision of the loveliness in life.
• Faubion Bowers, The Saturday Review, May 13, 1957:
Snow Country deals with three characters, a man and two women. Its setting is the bleak, other-side of Japan in the mountains along the Japan Sea, utterly different from the more familiar and tourist-traveled sides of Tokyo and Kyoto. It is cold in the snow country. There is skiing. There are hot baths. There are geisha and hotel maids, both of whom are greatly looked down on in contrast to their big city counterparts on the opposite side of Japan. The resorts themselves, too, are totally unfashionable. There are few travelers or customers. It is a lonely world.
The fly-leaf describes the theme of Snow Country as “the possibility of love in an earthly paradise.” It also adds, “Does the perfect fulfilment of sensory pleasure nourish love or does hedonism defeat itself through satiation…?” I must admit that I did not find this theme. In fact, there seems to me to be no theme at all — only some of the most beautiful and perfect mood writing I have ever read, and all expertly conveyed into English.
Snow Country is an experience. A reader is changed and moved by it. Somewhere in the depths of his mind he will find he has lived in that cold, snowy air, seen the landscape, stopped over in the inns, spent the night with the geishas, and even longed for the spring that seems so far away. Somehow the reader ends by understanding far more than ever comes to words in the pages of this fine novel.
• J. Martin Holman, in The Encyclopedia of the Novel (1998):
In 1937 Kawabata Yasunari published under the title Yukiguni (Snow Country) a collection of related short stories that had appeared previously in magazines. The book was well received and earned the author a prominent literary prize, which encouraged him to devote less time to writing reviews of new fiction and more to his own creative efforts. But this version of Snow Country was not the piece for which Kawabata was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1968. The final version of Snow Country was not published until 1948, after a number of additions to the 1937 version and much revision.
Structurally, Snow Country and many of Kawabata’s other longer works have been compared to the traditional Japanese linked-verse poetry, or renga. The ancient form involves one or more poets who compose a sequence of verses, with each new verse playing off the one immediately preceding. Renga shows little architectural regard for the overall structure of the poem; instead it focuses on the linear development of each succeeding link. The sequence of scenes in Snow Country does suggest just such a train of traditionally linked associations. It also exhibits the occasionally puzzling or even jarring juxtaposition of images of the modernism that Kawabata promoted early in his career as a theorist for the New Perception school. This work also has been likened to stream-of-consciousness techniques with which Kawabata was familiar from translations of Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
In the case of Snow Country, Kawabata had had no intention of writing a novel when he began it and had no vision of what the full work would encompass. The publishing history of Snow Country is one of the most complex in Japanese literature, although not particularly unusual for Kawabata. His first story, about a Tokyo dilettante (Shimamura) and the geisha (Komako) he visits in a snowy northern province, “Yugeshiki no kagami” (Mirror of an Evening Scene), was published in the literary magazine Bungei Shunju in January 1935. Unable to include all he wished to write about these characters before the magazine’s copy deadline, Kawabata continued the story in a second piece, “Shiroi asa no kagami” (“Mirror of a White Morning”), which he published in a different magazine whose deadline for the January issue was some days later. Kawabata claimed that the feeling for the story stayed with him and induced him to write more and more about the characters-Shimamura, Komako, and the young woman Yoko.
Each time he wrote about these characters it was as if he were recalling forgotten scenes. Toward the end of 1935, the third and fourth installments of the “Snow Country” sequence were published in yet a different magazine; the fifth appeared in still another magazine in 1936. Kawabata went on to write a sixth and a seventh “Snow Country” story, and these were published in 1936 and 1937 in two magazines in which earlier pieces had appeared. The completed 1937 book proved popular with readers and was adapted for the stage. However, Kawabata published two more “Snow Country” chapters in magazines in 1939 and 1940. He revised the whole work for the 1948 edition-on which translations into English and other languages are based. Even after the definitive version of Snow Country was published, Kawabata considered adding another chapter to the novel in order to clarify the vague relationship between Komako and Yoko, but ultimately he decided to abandon the project.
• From “Kawabata Yasunari: Snow In The Mirror,” by Gwenn Boardman, Critique, Spring 1969:
Snow Country, for example, is enriched by the emotional values of “season” words. In classical Japanese literature (not only in the much later haiku, that are more familiar in the west) the Japanese awareness of the season is already apparent. A single reference to “plus blossom,” or to “deer” (autumn), or to a particular variety of grass is sufficient to set the mood, rich in implied emotions and in associations. Kawabata refines this tradition to delineate character, to render the passage of time, and even to substitute for narrative at moments of in¬tense feeling.
The snow of Kawabata’s world is indebted to the “snow cult” that can be traced back through centuries of Japanese literature to ancient China. It is also the snow that lies deep in the waka of the ninth-century Kokinshu, in countless tanka, in the haiku masters such as Basho and Buson, and even in the verses of 1969’s housewives and businessmen. It is the snow linked with blossoms of transcendental beauty in such familiar phrases as hana-no-yuki (cherry-blossom snow). It is the snow found in such metaphors as “to tread snow” for “to undergo a hard experience.”
Kawabata’s own sensory — and sensual — images cannot be separated from this cultural heritage. His mystic reflections and implications, in turn, cannot be separated from his rich psychological insight. Interpretations of Snow Country must never be limited to seasonal, literary, and cultural allusions. The Japa¬nese reader has the advantage over those in the west when he shares Shimamura’s “moon-consciousness” as the moon shines “like a blade in blue ice.” Imbued with his nation’s unusual poetic sense, he can catch the allusions when Shimamura thinks of Basho’s descriptions of the Milky Way. Yet Shimamura, the protagonist of Snow Country, is also contemporary man — universal in implication, though so intensely Japanese in detail.
A middle-aged amateur scholar, “too plump for running,” Shimamura is a specialist in western ballet. With one qualifica¬tion: he has never seen a performance! Similarly, he has a taste for (rare) Chijimi linen, carefully collected and fashioned into summer kimono that he sends to be “snow-bleached” every year. What a beautiful image, as he thinks of the white linen spread out on the deep snow, the cloth and the snow glowing scarlet in the rising sun: he feels “bleached clean.” Only it turns out that a Tokyo shop takes care of details: Shimamura does not even know where the work is really done. Once again, he has merely read about it “in an old book.” His continual ro¬manticism, always responding to “the attraction of the unreal,” inspires him with a view of “silver white flowers” on a far mountainside; he can quote passages about the lovely autumn grasses. Yet when mountain women stand before him, their backs bowed under the weight of the bundled grass, he can neither recognize the plant of his literary memories, nor discern that this grass and the “mountain flowers” are one and the same.
• Barry Gifford, from “Read ‘Em and Weep: My Favorite Novels”:
A completely different type of writer than Tanizaki, Kawabata was, compared to him, a kind of miniaturist. The beautiful images Kawabata paints are contrasted with his surgical thrusts to the heart, lethal blows landed strategically and so swiftly that the reader is unable to avoid the avalanche that follows. Kawabata employed a method called shosetsu, defined by the eminent translator Edward Seidensticker as “a
piece of autobiography or a set of memoirs, somewhat embroidered and colored but essentially nonfiction.” Mr. Seidensticker has noted that, while shosetsu contains elements of fiction, it is “a rather more flexible and generous and catholic term than ‘novel.’” Kawabata’s books seem pure but underneath the serenity is often a terrible, unspeakable brutality.
We will be talking about Snow Country on:
US: Monday, 27 May
8-9PM Eastern
7-8PM Central
6-7PM Mountain
5-6PM Pacific
Australia: Tuesday, 28 May
10-11AM Australian Eastern
9:30-10:30AM Australian Central
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