Snow Country

Summary

Snow Country is a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, first published in installments in Japanese magazines from 1935, collected in book form in 1937 and completed in a final version in 1948. Edward G. Seidensticker's English translation appeared in 1956, and the novel was among the works discussed in the presentation speech when Kawabata received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. Shimamura, a well-off man from Tokyo with a wife and children, lives on inherited money and writes about Western ballet, which he has never seen performed. He travels repeatedly to a hot-spring town in the mountains on the Japan Sea side of Honshu, where heavy winter snow cuts the region off for months. On his first visit, in early summer, he meets Komako, a young woman who later becomes a geisha, and they begin an affair. The novel opens with his second visit, in winter. On the train he watches a girl named Yoko tend a sick young man, Yukio, and sees her face reflected in the window against the darkening landscape. Yukio is the son of Komako's music teacher, and gossip says Komako became a geisha to pay for his medical care, which she denies. Komako visits Shimamura at the inn, drinks, plays the samisen and speaks of the diary and the notes on novels she has kept for years. When Yukio is dying, she refuses to leave Shimamura at the station to go to him. Shimamura returns again the following autumn. Komako's feelings for him are intense and open, while he regards her love, and his own life, as 'wasted effort'. Yoko asks him to take her to Tokyo. The book ends on a winter night when a fire breaks out in a warehouse used to show films; Yoko falls from the balcony, Komako carries her from the flames, and Shimamura, looking up, feels the Milky Way flowing down into him. The novel is noted for its spare, suggestive style, its use of images of snow, mirrors and light, and an episodic structure that critics have compared to linked verse in the haiku tradition. Kawabata revised and extended it over more than a decade.

Top Lessons

• Beauty and detachment

  Shimamura admires Komako and Yoko as he admires landscapes, from a distance. The novel invites reflection on observing life versus taking part in it.

• Imagery

  Snow, reflections, insects and the Milky Way recur throughout. Students can trace how Kawabata builds meaning through images rather than explanation.

• Wasted effort

  Shimamura calls Komako's diaries and devotion 'wasted effort', yet she persists. The novel raises questions about the value of effort that has no visible result.

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