Snow Country

At first, Shimamura’s excursion to go see the chijimi linen being bleached seems to be a non sequitur from the rest of the story, a respite from the tragic events that are occurring at the onsen. Considering the book’s original episodic publishing, this segmented reading holds up. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that the chijimi episode is highly entangled with the events at the onsen, and symbolic imagery ties the two settings together. In a figurative reading, the linen can be understood as a stand-in for Shimamura himself; both he and his chijimi kimonos shuttle back and forth between snow country and Tokyo each year, finding escape and renewal in the rural setting.

In the case of the linen, the snow itself bleaches and refreshes. Kawabata writes his account of this process with pseudo-anthropological precision, and this tone adds a fetishistic undertone to Shimamura’s thought process:

It was a great deal of trouble to return old kimonos—that had touched the skin of he could not know whom—for rebleaching each year to the country that had produced them; but when he considered the labors of those mountain maidens, he wanted the bleaching to be done properly in the country where the maidens had lived. The thought of the white linen, spread out on the deep snow, the cloth and the snow glowing scarlet in the rising sun, was enough to make him feel […] even that he himself had been bleached clean (152).

The language of cleansing here mirrors the way Shimamura has described Komako since the start of the novel: “It occurred to him now that the thought of washing away in such short order the vigor of seven days in the mountains had perhaps first come to him when he saw the cleanness of this woman” (31). Just as the chijimi kimonos achieve cleanliness against the snow-filled fields of the region, Shimamura achieves a sense of internal cleanliness in the presence of Komako. A woman epitomizes the region to him, reinforcing Landscapes as Metaphors for the Body. This also reflects The Commodification of Female Talent and Affection in explicitly comparing Komako to an object, both with the shared purpose of benefiting Shimamura, the consumer. This homology between the bleaching of the linen and the cleansing of Shimamura is also evident linguistically; Petersen notes that the Japanese words for “purity” and “clean” used to describe Komako and the snow bleaching are linguistically related to the Japanese word for mirror (Petersen, 136). As such, the imagery of the train mirror, the chijimi linen, and Komako herself are tied together by language.

Linking these things together underlines that they are all the objects of Shimamura’s fantastical gaze. The pseudo-anthropological fetishism with which the protagonist approaches chijimi linen is the same persona with which he approaches the European ballet. Both are folk arts that he understands only in the abstract, having encountered them in literature, but cannot grasp their reality. Kawabata comments on his insensitivity to reality, writing, “The nameless workers, so diligent while they lived, had presently died, and only the Chijimi remained, the plaything of men like Shimamura, cool and fresh against the skin in the summer” (157). Shimamura’s tactless commentary to the noodle shop owner about compelling nuns to make chijimi during the winter season—assuming they could not have anything better to do—reinforces his cultural ignorance. His tendency to objectify the women of the region extends even to nonsecular women, the nuns, who are unavailable to him but nonetheless appear to him as sources of his luxury.

During this outing, what has been clear from the outset—that his relationship with Komako is doomed to fail—finally becomes clear to Shimamura. His internal dialogue has an air of calm resignation to the situation’s tragedy: “All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. […] And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever” (155). What follows at the warehouse, then, is an unexpectedly violent, dramatic end to his time in snow country. This extreme tonal shift between the chijimi scene and the fire scene adds to the inscrutability of the novel’s ending, which is already ambiguous on its own. As a supplement to the other events in Snow Country, Shimamura’s excursion to find the chijimi artisans heightens the dynamics that Kawabata illustrates elsewhere.

The final scene illustrates Shimamura’s callous and objectifying nature, which is concerned only with fulfilling his desire for beauty and pleasure. Despite his obsession with Yoko throughout the text, he is distant while she lies dead or dying, juxtaposed with Komako’s emotional reaction. Instead, he turns his attention from her body to the sky; Yoko’s death only signifies an expired source of pleasure, and Shimamura simply turns to the next beautiful thing, unchanged by the events happening around him.