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.
Themes
The Commodification of Female Talent and Affection
Komako’s career as a geisha is simultaneously what brings her to Shimamura and what drives them apart. Her work, juxtaposed with the deeply intimate nature of the novel, is of primary concern to Kawabata and is in keeping with many of the author’s other works, which chronicle women making ends meet through artistry. In Snow Country, this commodification goes beyond artistic talent, extending to the very core of Komako’s being and her affectionate feelings toward Shimamura.
Her introduction explicitly markets her as a product from Shimamura’s point of view. In the absence of other geishas to keep him company, the maid at the inn conveys Komako’s virtues to Shimamura: “Since there were no young apprentice geisha in the town, and since most of the local geisha were at an age when they preferred not to have to dance, the services of the girl were much valued” (17). The language of “value” here immediately evokes the familiar economic terminology of supply and demand, indicating that Komako has stepped up to fill a gap in her community’s tourist economy, benefitting not only herself but the townspeople whose businesses rely on geisha entertainment. Indeed, monetary exchange is the lifeblood of Komako and Shimamura’s relationship, even as the two lovers get lost in their romantic and erotic fantasies about one another. Shimamura’s wealth is reemphasized throughout the novel, sometimes subtly but sometimes explicitly. In one romantic exchange, Komako abruptly asks him, “With you it’s not a question of money, is it? Have you always had so much to spend?” (80-81). Such a jarring reminder of the couple’s socioeconomic incompatibility illuminates the romantic facade that the protagonists have allowed to obscure reality.
Komako’s femininity, therefore, is on display and for sale for the duration of the novel. As a geisha, she is trained to appear, behave, and perform with unparalleled femininity. Ultimately, this feminine allure draws Shimamura to her: “To Shimamura there was something touching about the fact that such a woman could call him back from afar” (106). Though he has mixed feelings about Komako’s love for him, Shimamura finds value in the guarantee of that affection, leaving his own wife and children in search of it throughout the year. For the town’s business people, most immediately the innkeepers, Komako’s ability to entertain and provide men with affection brings income, turning emotional connection into profit.
Landscapes as Metaphors for the Body
As its title suggests, Snow Country is a novel concerned with the Japanese landscape. Readers view these landscapes through Shimamura’s fantastical perspective, through which they also view the bodies of the women he romanticizes. Thus, a homology between the landscape and bodies emerges over the course of the novel. The opening scene, in which Shimamura becomes fixated by the superimposition of Yoko’s reflection over the snowy mountains, introduces this metaphor. Kawabata writes, “The girl’s face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains” (10). Shimamura thus forms his initial, romanticized conflation of snow country and the women within it; these two fantasies cannot be disentangled. He uses language to describe both Yoko and Komako that corresponds with the natural world. For example, he is often preoccupied with the temperature of Komako’s hair: “Shimamura looked at the hair and wondered whether the coldness that had so startled him—he had never touched such cold hair, he said—might be less the cold of the snow-country winter than something in the hair itself” (39). Just as the snowy world around him is intrinsically cold, Shimamura suspects that Komako’s body is as well. Through these comparisons between landscapes and people, Shimamura dehumanizes women, reducing them to objects to be viewed and consumed for pleasure.
At the same time, Shimamura’s own physical experience is highly correlated with the landscapes that surround him. The same sense of cold that pervades his perceptions of Komako and Yoko makes its way into his being. Petersen writes that “Kawabata's sensory—and sensual—images depict a cold that strikes at the core of Shimamura's being and sounds of the freezing of snow over the land” (Petersen, 139). Indeed, Shimamura often feels inexplicably chilled to the bone, at times writing the feeling off as a nasty side-effect of the saké that he has had to drink. However, something more profound is at play; the landscape of snow country is reflected in Shimamura’s bodily functions as a sort of somatic tether. The extreme influence exerted on characters’ bodies by the scenery reveals inner truths about them. For example, the cold landscape, reflected in the literal temperatures of Shimamura and Komako’s bodies, manifests the emotional distance between the two lovers. Though it is at first unclear why the novel takes its name from the landscape, the title is a clue about the figurative significance of the environment since it reveals much about the characters’ physical and emotional experiences.
Romance as an Internal Experience
Although Snow Country is a romantic novel, Kawabata rarely depicts his characters expressing their love for one another. Instead, he focuses on each character’s internal experience of that love. In this sense, the romance between Komako and Shimamura is a self-centered one, especially for Shimamura. Despite being in close physical proximity during each of Shimamura’s visits, the two lovers are worlds away internally. Kawabata illustrates this distance through disjointed dialogue and characterization.
From the start, Shimamura’s infatuation with Komako is fueled by internally driven fantasies rather than by paying close attention to her. He is vaguely aware of his fetishistic gaze, recognizing the homology between the way he looks at Western ballet dancers and the way he looks at her. Kawabata writes, “[H]ardly knowing it, he was treating the woman exactly as he treated the western dance” (25). He never makes this fantasy explicit to Komako, preferring to preserve his fantasies by hiding them away. Likewise, Komako keeps her thoughts and fears about their relationship mostly to herself, lashing out with petty comments that reveal what is happening in her mind. This tendency becomes the most apparent in the way she speaks to Shimamura about his infatuation with Yoko: “I suppose you like her sort of eyes. […] Try seducing her too before you answer my question” (133). These words, uttered carelessly while she is drunk, reveal that Komako has been paying closer attention to Shimamura than she lets on, perhaps even closer attention than he pays himself. Despite never having said so to Komako, Shimamura is indeed fascinated by Yoko’s eyes and has been since the beginning of the book.
Kawabata’s use of third-person limited (as opposed to omniscient) perspective allows him to signal toward these internal romantic landscapes without revealing them entirely. Readers can only use the elusive dialogue and occasional insights that the author provides to piece together the story’s romantic subtext. This narrative technique draws heavily from the Japanese literary tradition. Petersen states that Kawabata, “writes eloquently of characteristic Japanese art, in which the ‘heart’ is space, succinctness, and ‘what is left out’” (Petersen, 127). In Snow Country, romance exists precisely in the words that go unwritten, in the negative space of the story. To find it, readers must perceive the internal worlds of the protagonists through closely reading their words and actions.
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