Snow Country

“It was a distant, cold light. As it sent its small ray through the pupil of the girl’s eye, as the eye and the light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains.”

Kawabata uses chiasmus—ray, eye, eye, light—to visually mimic the process of the eye being reflected in the window. Such wordplay reinforces the uncanniness of the phenomenon, creating a version of what Shimamura is experiencing.

“Shimamura, who lived a life of idleness, found that he tended to lose his honesty with himself, and he frequently went out alone into the mountains to recover something of it.”

To himself, Shimamura frames his trips to snow country as self-interventions. In truth, he uses trips to fuel his escapist fantasies. He is only able to achieve honesty with himself in the final moments of the novel, just before disaster strikes at the warehouse. In retrospect, this statement carries heavy irony.

“He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen.”

Wealthy and without responsibility, Shimamura could likely afford to see the ballet in person if he so desired. The last sentence of this quote, a simile likening his study to a love affair, reveals exactly what he wants to get out of romance: an escape from his realities. Presumably, if he were to ever see ballet dancers in person, they would not live up to the “phantasms of his own dancing imagination,” and the love affair would end. Just so, when he comes to terms with the realities of the women he is infatuated with, namely Komako and Yoko, he cannot sustain his romantic feelings for them.

“Two yellow butterflies flew up at his feet. The butterflies, weaving in and out, climbed higher than the line of the Border Range, their yellow turning to white in the distance.”

As Petersen outlines in The Moon in the Water, the yellow butterflies are a familiar symbol in Japanese literature, suggesting lovers who are destined only for a brief romance (Petersen, 139). Color imagery plays an important role in Kawabata’s use of symbolism; the fading of the insects from yellow to white suggests the fading of the romance itself. For Shimamura, standing on the side of the hill about to embark on his affair with Komako, the butterflies’ significance does not register.

“It became clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and that he had taken his usual roundabout way of saying so, he began to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful.”

There are frequently glimmers of self-awareness in Shimamura that give way to his hedonistic tendencies. Here, Shimamura recognizes in some capacity that his behavior toward Komako has been less than upstanding, and he calls himself “repulsive.” Instead of registering this information with shame, however, it only fuels his romantic fantasies.

“It occurred to Shimamura that his own distant fantasy on the western ballet, built up from words and photographs in foreign books, was not in its way dissimilar.”

A connection is drawn between Shimamura’s fascination with ballet and Komako’s habit of writing about foreign literature in her diary. This comparison simultaneously trivializes both characters’ hobbies. By comparing his amateur scholarship to journaling, Shimamura unwittingly acknowledges that his work on ballet is more for himself than any grander, scholarly purpose. At the same time, by comparing Komako’s journaling to his unserious studies, Shimamura invalidates the importance the activity holds for her.

“The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily. Against it, the woman’s hair became a clearer black, touched with a purple sheen.”

Kawabata’s use of color imagery, in tandem with the symbolism of the snow, pulls the scene out of the realm of the ordinary and into Shimamura’s distorted fantasy world, where everything sensory is heightened. The high contrast between the white snow and dark, purple-black hair, enriches the depth of each color, giving the world a hyper-vivid appearance unique to snow country (at least in Shimamura’s mind).

“This morning, as he glanced at Komako in that mirror reflecting the mountain snow, he had of course thought of the girl in the evening train window. Why then had he said nothing?”

Using the mirror as a uniting symbol of his fantastical infatuation, Shimamura compares Komako to Yoko (and he will do this again in the next quote). His rhetorical question suggests a lack of self-awareness; he has behaved reflexively, without thinking through the reasons for his behavior.

“It was cold as a very distant light, for the inexpressible beauty of it had made his heart rise when, the night before, that light off in the mountains had passed across the girl’s face in the train window and lighted her eye for a moment. The impression came back to Shimamura, and with it, the memory of the mirror filled with snow, and Komako’s red cheeks floating in the middle of it.”

Here, two mirrors are likened to one another: the “strange mirror” of the train window and Komako’s vanity mirror at the inn. The conflation of these two mirrors in Shimamura’s imagination indicates that there are fundamental similarities between the two women and his feelings for them, even though they are unable to get along.

“It was almost too ordinary a thing to hear gossip about geisha from the hot-spring masseuse, and that fact had the perverse effect of making the news the more startling; and Komako’s having become a geisha to help her fiancé was so ordinary a bit of melodrama that he found himself almost refusing to accept it. Perhaps certain moral considerations—questions of the propriety of selling oneself as a geisha—helped the refusal.”

Shimamura is immediately off put by the mundanity of the masseuse’s information about Komako and Yoko; despite having eagerly sought the information, he is not prepared for it to contradict his otherworldly fantasies about the women. This is another way Shimamura objectifies women, unable to conceive of them having regular lives. Ultimately, the moral judgement that he places on Komako for engaging in sex work characterizes him as hypocritical since he is her customer.

“She was a mountain geisha, not yet twenty, and she could hardly be as good as all that, he told himself. And in spite of the fact that she was in a small room, was she not slamming away at the instrument as though she were on the stage? He was being carried away by his own mountain emotionalism.”

Despite being obsessed with her, Shimamura refuses to treat Komako with esteem because of her lowly role as a geisha. His thinking about her here is demeaning as he credits his enjoyment of her samisen performance with a deceptive state of mind brought forward by the mountain scenery. Such assumptions underscore the geographic tension and classism that lies at the heart of the novel.

“They were evidently discussing the bill for her services as a geisha, and the manager perhaps thought it would be unreasonable to charge for the whole sixteen or seventeen hours.”

In an otherwise highly figurative work, the extreme practicality of this moment is a jarring contrast. It undermines the romantic facade of the entire story. There is also a tragedy in the observation that Komako is lowering her rates out of courtesy; suggestions of Shimamura’s wealth elsewhere make it clear that he would be able to afford the full cost, and Komako needs that money. This highlights the devaluation of women’s work.

“Do you think it’s right not to say good-by to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of the very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.”

Shimamura speaks to Komako with a condescending tone, challenging the morality of her behavior. His invocation of her diary can be read either as manipulative or empathetic, as he makes an appeal to something that he knows is important to her. At the same time, the reduction of Yukio’s life to a book indicates how Shimamura dehumanizes him, viewing him as nothing more than an obstacle to accessing Yoko.

“You don’t mean that. I dislike people from Tokyo because they’re always lying.”

Just as Shimamura stereotypes Komako as a person from snow country, Komako stereotypes Shimamura as a person from Tokyo. There is a broader conflict between two regions and their cultures: the large modern metropolis of Tokyo and the rural resort towns in snow country. Though this conflict can never be fully explored because no action takes place in Tokyo, it is an undercurrent that determines how the characters treat each other and an important piece of subtext.

“She had a patron build the place for her, and then, when she was all ready to move in, she threw it over. She found someone she liked and was going to marry him, but he ran off and left her. Is that what happens when you lose your head over a man? I wonder.”

Komako’s rhetorical question, offered as a response to her colleague’s decline, has implications for herself. As rhetorical questions frequently do, it raises further questions about whether Komako has lost her head over Shimamura and, if so, if her career is headed toward a downward spiral.

“He had come three times in less than two years, and on each new visit he had found Komako’s life changed.”

The dynamism of Komako’s life is foreign to Shimamura, whose wealth and family provide him with the stability necessary to take frequent vacations without care. The lack of continuity in his exposure to Komako makes this realization startling for him. The text mimics this noncontinuity since Kawabata only provides accounts of Shimamura’s trips to the onsen, and gaps in time become mysteries to solve.

“She sat beside his pillow, the picture of the proper housewife. Shimamura stretched and yawned. He took the hand on her knee and caressed the small fingers, callused from playing the samisen.”

Komako’s domestic appearance is ironic in light of her work and the knowledge that Shimamura has a housewife waiting for him in Tokyo. Her fingers are a reminder of this irony since they calloused while playing the samisen, an occupational hazard for geishas.

“I’m never able to be completely open with living people, and I want at least to be honest with him now that he’s dead.”

As always, Komako speaks with a cutting, blunt tone. Here, it is even harsher because of the difficult subject matter. Her admission that she is “never able to be completely open,” is a clue that she is intentionally hiding things about herself from Shimamura. These secrets can be teased out in the novel’s subtext.

“He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.”

Another fleeting moment of self-awareness on Shimamura’s part, he sees himself as “empty.” This language will be echoed later during his expedition to find chijimi makers when he finds himself “gazing at his own coldness” (see quote 23). The simile likening Komako’s existence to her skin recalls his fixation on her skin in other scenes and also amounts to objectification.

“She brings saké, and then stands there staring in at us, with her eyes flashing. I suppose you like her sort of eyes.”

Komako’s observation that Shimamura must like Yoko’s eyes refers back to the opening train scene in which he became obsessed with the reflection of her eyes in the window. The subtext here is that Komako knows exactly what is going on between Shimamura and Yoko. Even her use of the word “flashing,” emulates the luminance that drew Shimamura to Yoko’s eyes in the train window.

“You’re a good woman.”

This is a climactic piece of dialogue but turns out to be entirely untranslatable from the original Japanese text. Petersen explains in The Moon in the Water that the word used for “woman” here connotes nothing more than a sexual partner, as opposed to the word Shimamura previously used, “girl,” which is an affectionate pet name (Petersen, 143). This shift is enough to make Komako realize that Shimamura will soon leave her forever.

“And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.”

The metaphorical snow piling up inside his chest, meant to illustrate the suffocating nature of his feelings, likens Shimamura’s body to the landscape. This is a rare moment of introspection for Shimamura, and it leads him, for the first time in the novel, to a firm conclusion about what he must do. Though the novel’s ambiguous ending conceals how his relationship with Komako ends, this quote suggests that he plans to cut it off.

“He did not know why he should feel that a separation was forcing itself upon them.”

After taking ownership of his own flaws and behavior toward Komako during the chijimi excursion, Shimamura dissociates once more. By putting himself and Komako in the passive voice in this quote, he revokes any agency and, therefore, any responsibility he has over their tragic circumstances.