37 pages • 1 hour read
Yasunari KawabataSnow Country
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1937A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Pages 1-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Pages 1-38 Summary
Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante, takes a train to snow country in the Japanese countryside, leaving his wife and children behind in Tokyo. On the train, he observes an attractive woman named Yoko speaking with the stationmaster about her brother, who has begun working for the railway. As the train travels toward the next stop, Yoko returns to her travel partner, a man who appears to be ill, in a seat behind Shimamura. Shimamura becomes transfixed by Yoko’s voice and her reflection in the window that he gazes out of. He is mesmerized by the way her eye appears to float amid the mountains outside. He thinks of this surreal interplay of images as a “strange mirror.”
Upon arriving at his destination, an onsen town, Shimamura is surprised to see that Yoko and her companion are getting off at the same stop. He heads toward an inn, where he hopes to find Komako, an amateur geisha with whom he began a romantic relationship during his previous visit to snow country. Inside, the innkeeper informs him that the man he saw on the train with Yoko is Yukio, the son of the local music teacher, whose home Komako lives in. He also discovers that Komako has become a professional geisha during his time away. He tells Komako that his finger (the one he used to wipe fog off of the train window) “remembered her” while he was away. Komako is amused by this and holds his hand against her face. He tells her he has never touched hair as cold as hers and that she was wrong about something she said during their last conversation.
At this point, the story flashes back to Shimamura’s previous trip to snow country in the spring, when he first met Komako. During his first night at the inn, he requested that a geisha be hired for him, but all of the town’s professional geishas were working at a party and could not be spared for him. Komako, still an amateur, was called in for him as a last resort. Shimamura was keenly aware that Komako was inexperienced, and despite making pleasant conversation about the mountains and her life in snow country, he was unable to see her as sexually desirable. The following afternoon, he asked her to call another geisha for him.
Komako, visibly insulted by this request, resisted: “Isn’t it fine that you think you can ask me a thing like that!” (20). Shimamura attempted to placate her by explaining that hiring a different geisha would allow them to preserve their friendship. Kawabata then reveals at this point in the flashback that Shimamura is an amateur scholar of Western ballet, and his fascination with the exotic dance form is similar to his fascination with the exotic women of snow country. Komako reluctantly acquiesced to Shimamura’s rude request, and another geisha was summoned to keep him company. However, he found this second geisha repulsive and fled the inn to get away from her.
On the mountainside next to the inn, Shimamura saw two yellow butterflies flying beside one another and looked up to see Komako waiting for him with his tobacco. He realized that he had desired Komako all along, and at that point, the two began their love affair. Later that night, Komako drunkenly stumbled into his room and told him to return home to Tokyo, though she also clung to him. She was convinced that Shimamura was laughing at her and told him so. Shimamura got on a train back to Tokyo the next morning.
Part 1, Pages 1-38 Analysis
The novel’s opening scene, in which Shimamura is entranced by the superimposition of Yoko’s image onto the landscape in the train window, is figuratively rich and establishes key imagery that will reappear throughout the text. Kawabata introduces Shimamura’s vivid, imaginative tendencies as he waxes poetic about what he sees in the window: “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” (10-11). This cinematic imagery draws upon the work of generations of Japanese writers before Kawabata, who established the reflection as a beloved motif in the country’s literary tradition. Shimamura’s “strange mirror,” therefore, must be understood in its cultural context.
Gwenn Boardman Petersen’s 1979 scholarly study, The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, takes its name from her examination of reflection imagery in Kawabata’s oeuvre. She argues that in Snow Country, the train mirror “foreshadows the link between Yoko and Komako: Shimamura wipes the window with the one finger that ‘remembers’ the woman of the snow country and is startled by an eye that floats in the mirror-window” (Petersen, 138). The mirror is thus simultaneously a manifestation of Shimamura’s fetishistic fantasies and an insight into the story’s realities. Namely, it reveals the unpleasant truth of the hero’s inability to treat his romantic interests as complete humans.
In this sense, the train mirror is the novel’s first foray into its exploration of Romance as an Internal Experience. Shimamura’s infatuation with Yoko is elevated in this scene but triggered only by the sound of her voice and the sight of her face. The rest is entirely up to Shimamura’s imagination. He even goes so far as to construct a backstory for Yoko that suits his needs, telling himself to “cut the girl off from the man with her and [decide] from her general appearance and manner that she [is] unmarried” (6). In this moment, it is clear that Shimamura does not care to respect Yoko’s relationship with Yukio or be sympathetic to Yukio’s illness. He wants only to indulge his romantic fantasy of Yoko being available to him and will spend the rest of the novel trying to make this fantasy a reality.
The narration makes these character flaws apparent, but Shimamura is not able to recognize them within himself. Instead, his lack of self-awareness is a boon in his romantic escapades. When he meets Komako on the hillside outside the inn, “[I]t [becomes] clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and […] he [begins] to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful” (32). Thus, his self-ignorance fuels the fetishistic fantasy he has of Komako as a purifying force for him. Once again, the object of his desire plays no active part in cultivating this fantasy; instead, he generates it all on his own. This flighty, non-committal attitude is represented by the yellow butterflies fluttering nearby; Petersen explains that such butterflies in Japanese literature are “ichinichizuma: ‘one-day spouses,’ suggesting the fleeting nature of the Komako-Shimamura relationship” (Petersen, 139). This is another example of how Kawabata draws upon a lexicon of imagery unique to Japanese literature to convey his ideas without revealing much explicitly.
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