Snow Country (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Unless you are familiar with Japanese culture and language, you will find Snow Country different from most any novel you may have read. Read superficially the novel appears to follow a simple plot and structure. Yet, its intensity and beauty lies in the lyrical imagery of landscape and evocation of the protagonists' complex psyche and their relationships.

The novel can be compared to a Japanese brushstroke painting, economic and suggestive, where the observant eye is able to complete the picture or the story. To fully appreciate Kawabata's prose in English, newcomers are well advised to empty their minds of other, mainly western, literary experiences and expectations and open up to a different world. Snow Country has to be read at a very slow pace. Every word has importance, with sometimes more than one meaning. With these preparations and attitude of mind, Snow Country is an enriching experience that will linger on long after reading it.

Kawabata tells the story of Shimamura, a wealthy man of leisure who's visiting a hot springs mountain resort to meet the local geisha, Komako. He comes for distraction and out of boredom with his real life in Tokyo. Komako is a reluctant geisha, but has resigned herself to her role, while hoping for some other life. The contrast between what they are and what they would like to be is played out in their interactions. Shimamura is drawn to the unreal or the unlikely or impossible. He wants to remain "just friends" with Komako. Her chatty and highly emotional outbursts leave him somewhat amused and bored, yet he misses her when away from her. She does not behave like a real mountain geisha. His room is like a refuge from that life, a place where she can literally let her hair down. Shimamura's attraction for the other young girl, Yoko, a friend and rival to Komako, is as contradictory. In her shyness and reserve she is desirable. She appears to him beautiful and pure, a delicate reflection in the window against the mountain landscape.

Nature and landscape are of great importance to Kawabata and articulated through Shimamura. Nature's beauty is felt more intensely by him than anything else. When he and Komako find themselves outdoors, they have nothing to say to each other. Yet even nature provokes contradictory emotions in Shimamura. "...he looked upon mountain climbing as almost a model of wasted effort. For that very reason it pulled at him with the attraction of the unreal."

Kawabata was one of Japan's most famous writers. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. His Nobel Lecture elucidates his deep affinity to and understanding of classical haiku poetry. Haiku represents a fundamental element of Japanese culture then and now. Snow Country has been described as haiku in prose. Kawabata uses a shorthand style for his descriptions, evoking simultaneously multiple senses, like colour and temperature, stillness and motion, attraction and rejection. Nature is all encompassing with people one component of the wider picture. The novel is rich in symbolism and references to Japanese traditions and mythology. However, some are easier to identify than others. While accepting that the English language reader will miss some of the deeper meanings and connotations, Snow Country is a novel that opens a fascinating world and deservedly has an enviable place in international literature. It is difficult to comment on the quality of Seidensticker's translation. Still, as others have expressed, one wonders whether the translation could have contributed more to the novel's appreciation by the reader. [Friederike Knabe]

In Japanese the term "Yukiguni", or "Snow Country", is used to describe those areas of western Honshu, between the mountains and the Sea of Japan, which receive large amounts of snow in winter, and it is in this area that the novel is set. The action takes place during the 1930s. Shimamura, a wealthy man from Tokyo, arrives in a remote hot spring resort in the mountains, where he engages in an affair with Komako, a local geisha.

The resort in this book is not a typical family holiday resort in the sense that Westerners would understand the term. The tradition in Japan appears to have been for hot springs in the Snow Country to cater for male travellers travelling alone in search of female companionship. The geishas found in such resorts were different to the geishas found in major cities, who are primarily entertainers. Hot spring geishas were expected to "entertain" their male patrons in both senses of that verb, and, as the translator Edward Seidensticker points out in his introduction, the pretence that she was an artist and not a prostitute was often a thin one indeed. The romance (if it deserves that name) between Komako and Shimamura is therefore a doomed one; she is in love with him, but not vice-versa. He may be in love with her beauty, and her arts, but that is not the same thing. Kawabata paints Shimamura as a shallow dilettante and playboy; the most telling detail about his character is that although he claims to be an expert on Western ballet his knowledge of it is derived entirely from books. He has never actually seen a ballet in his life- a detail symbolising his distancing of himself from life.

The fact that Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968 suggests that his work has been appreciated in the West as well as in his native country, but he strikes me as being a writer who is stylistically and aesthetically quite different to most Western novelists, more different than other Japanese writers I have read such as Shusaku Endo and Haruki Murakami. (Kawabata appears to have been part of a movement which rejected Western literary influences, unlike some of his contemporaries who were greatly influenced by European Naturalism). I did, however, derive some assistance from Seidensticker's useful introduction. One point the translator makes is that Kawabata was influenced by the Japanese tradition of haiku poetry. These very brief 17-syllable poems may seem as different from the novel as it is possible for a literary form to be, but Seidensticker points out that in "Snow Country" Kawabata makes use of some of the characteristics of the haiku, such as sudden sensory impressions giving rise to an awareness of beauty.

Another Japanese cultural characteristic present in the work is what has been called "mono no aware", or "the sadness of things"- a sense of wistfulness at the transience and impermanence of all earthly things. Seidensticker describes the geisha Komako herself as "a particularly poignant symbol of wasted, decaying beauty", but many of the natural phenomena mentioned as also things noted for their fleeting, transient character, such as the autumn leaves or the snow itself.

My main difficulty with this book was that of trying to overcome my own cultural expectations and trying to enter into the author's very different world. Certainly, if one tries to read this as a Western-style novel it is likely to prove a disappointment- the plot, particularly the ending, is rather enigmatic and the characterisation is not very deep. It does, however, hold interest for a Western readership in the insights it gives us into another culture, not only though the descriptions of Japanese life contained in the text but also through its revelation of a cultural aesthetic quite different to our own.

This book was absolutely wonderful and very moving. I found myself thinking about the characters and setting for days after I finished the book. This book tells the story of tragic and hopeless love through a very unique and heartbreaking approach. The setting of the cold mountain area was described in such a way that brought chills down my back. This was an excellent book that went straight to my heart. Read it.