Snow Country

The first Japanese author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. His childhood was defined by familial tragedy; his parents died when he was four years old, his older sister when he was 11, his paternal grandmother when he was seven, and his paternal grandfather when he was 15. Amid this torrent of loss, Kawabata threw himself into his literature studies. He attended Tokyo Imperial University (later called the University of Tokyo), where he was responsible for reviving its defunct literary magazine, Shin-shichō. By the time he was 25, Kawabata entrenched himself in Japan’s most cutting-edge literary circles. He helped found Bungei Jidai, a journal aimed at ushering in a movement of “new impressions” in Japanese literature.

Despite Kawabata’s forward-thinking approach to writing, his work remained deeply rooted in his country’s centuries-old literary traditions. As Gwenn Boardman Petersen writes, Kawabata “repeatedly [spoke] of his intention: to preserve the ‘traditional taste,’ that is, the poetic sense, of Japan” (Boardman Petersen, Gwenn. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. University of Hawai’i Press, 1979). In Snow Country, this “traditional taste” emerges vividly in the particular imagery he utilizes, and his tendency to place meaning in the text’s negative spaces; what goes unsaid is very frequently more important than what is said.

In his 1968 Nobel Lecture, entitled “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself,” Kawabata noted Western readers’ tendency to misinterpret the philosophical underpinnings of his stories. Quoting the cenotaphs of Myōe, a 13th-century Buddhist monk who likened the empty sky to spiritual truth, he remarked: “Here we have the emptiness, the nothingness, of the Orient. My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different” (Kawabata, Yasunari. “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself.” The Nobel Prize). Such observations indicate that Kawabata was highly aware of the distortion applied to his writings by the Western gaze, especially as the Nobel Committee shone an international spotlight on him. Non-Japanese readers, therefore, should be cognizant of their cultural and linguistic limitations when approaching Kawabata’s stories. As Petersen highlights, much of Kawabata’s meaning is inevitably lost in translation.

Kawabata died in an apparent suicide in 1972, less than five years after arguing against traditional Japanese attitudes toward suicide in his Nobel Lecture: “However alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint” (“Japan, the Beautiful and Myself”). His friends and contemporaries were baffled by this turn of events, and as such, his cause of death remains disputed. Petersen notes, however, that “the manner of Kawabata’s death seems utterly irrelevant to both his own delicacy of feeling and the sensitivity to beauty revealed in his writing” (Petersen, 189). Indeed, Kawabata’s mastery of romantic ennui has left a lasting mark on the literary world.