MONO NO AWARE: NATURE AND AESTHETICS IN
KAWABATA’S SNOW COUNTRY
by
Alexa Danielle Grohowski
A Senior Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Major in English
and the Bachelor of Arts Degree
Stetson University, DeLand, Florida
Advisor: Prof. Grady Ballenger
December 4, 2015! Grohowski 1
Kawabata Yasunari is a masterful Japanese novelist from the middle of the twentieth century. His critically acclaimed novel, Snow Country, was instrumental in awarding him the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, and the resulting fame brought the novel into international attention. The novel is highly imagistic and culturally-coded, which lends an interesting double life to the text – resulting from how an American would read the English translation and how a
Japanese would read the original novel, given the unique cultural and aesthetic backgrounds of both readers. This essay aims to supplement a Western reading of Snow Country with accessible avenues into the Japanese mindset necessary for approaching the complicated text. Ultimately, a sensibility to nature – a nuance that a Japanese audience would understand immediately – is what will guide this analysis. For Kawabata, nature is a prominent character which does not merely augment the human drama; in fact, its symbolic significance is often unlinked entirely. In
Japanese tradition, the ability to feel connected to and emotionally impacted by nature is known as mono no aware, and it was a prominent feature in all of Kawabata’s writing.
Shimamura travels to the snow country to escape his life in Tokyo, as many married businessmen did, seeking the solace of hot springs and rural geisha that were somewhat more like prostitutes and less like the established artists of Kyoto. He gets entangled in an affar with
Komako, a young mountain geisha, but he also becomes infatuated with another young woman on his second trip to the snow country. It is gradually revealed that Yoko and Komako have had a tumultuous yet undefined relationship over the affections of their adopted mother’s dying son,
Yukio, and Shimamura’s involvement with Komako seems to add tension all around. Yoko lingers in the background of the story, but she often occupies the foreground of Shimamura’s imagination. Grohowski 2
The setting in mountainous, rural Japan is crucial to the novel’s meaning; this rural atmosphere draws particular attention to the natural world, which provides the perfect backdrop for the fleeting nostalgia in the main tale of Shimamura and Komako. It also provides a perhaps unexpected opportunity for Shimamura to symbolically represent a Western reader, as he is essentially a tourist of his own culture visiting a quasi-traditional world preserved to bring pleasure to rich men like him. He is an outsider, and so he interacts with nature differently than local people in the novel. The source material for the novel’s location is a small ski and onsen resort town called Yuzawa in the Niigata Prefecture. Kawabata traveled frequently between
Tokyo and Yuzawa during the long development of Snow Country, and many details from the novel – the ryokan where Shimamura stayed, Komako, and the ending fire scene – were lifted directly from his experiences and observations. But the people that Kawabata met and the structures that they built are not the most important details about Yuzawa. This is the snow country, a place north of Tokyo on the other side of Honshu Island, where
wind from the Sea of Japan carries moisture that precipitates just north of the
mountains, where the wind stops. Snow levels of about 5 meters are not
uncommon, causing villages to often become isolated from each other, with
snowfall rates in the prefecture among the highest in the world. This, of course,
was problematic in Kawabata’s days, but also helped create a unique, almost
dreamlike landscape. (Asenlund)
Given the extreme weather and deliberate remoteness of the setting, nature is necessarily the guiding tool of this analysis. Though my interest in Snow Country spans as far as form, gender, and publication, the thread running beneath it all is Kawabata’s unique treatment of the natural world. In this novel, there is a clear interest in the way the characters interact with and Grohowski 3 respond to nature. Additionally, nature often interrupts both the characters within the novel and the reader’s plot-narrative expectations, as in the post office episode discussed later in this paper.
Nature, more than any of the human action, is the most important part of the novel, reaffirmed time and again in the text when the human drama is subverted in favor of a natural aside.
The setting of the novel adds to this effect, as the snow country is not nearly as modern, populated, or affluent as some of the more famous urban regions across the mountains. Modern technology, though present in Snow Country, is not ostentatious, as Kawabata’s tone has a peculiar effect of normalizing the old and the new. His is a world suspended in time and spatially isolated, a place that is not only lagging behind the cultural epicenters like Kyōto and Tokyo but also fully self-aware that such obsoleteness adds to the charm of the cultural product it sells. The snow country in Kawabata’s novel is not, however, a place which is self-conscious about its modernity or lack thereof. Geishas take taxis, trains connect bustling metropolises with remote onsen communities. But mountains and piles of snow underscore it all, and the presence of technology is rendered simply unremarkable in the face of the forces of nature unique to this part of Japan.
Yasunari Kawabata introduced the world to modern Japanese literary tradition. While it may seem that “modern tradition” is a contradictory combination of words, it is perhaps the most concise way of describing Japanese culture in the twentieth century. Kawabata was a writer who encapsulated both worlds in his work – who had the high artifice to describe a man in a kimono on a train as if he was living out the spiritual mythology of The Tale of Genji. It should be noted that, in many areas of Japanese culture, it is often incorrectly assumed that “modern” is synonymous with “western.” However, the ancient traditions of this once-isolated country are still alive and well. They have adapted to the radical changes around them, but in many cases the Grohowski 4 traditions themselves have not been heavily altered – merely their sociocultural framework. The
Japanese have modernized while maintaining cultural agency, and Kawabata’s writing exemplifies this effect. Snow Country brings together certain incongruous terms like East and
West, transience and permanence, old and new, and connects them through poetic juxtapositions.
Though Snow Country was written and published in small pieces spanning a number of years and periods, the majority of the novel took form during a period known either as the
Interwar Years or the Prewar Years in the 1930s. “The main legacy of modern Japanese literature during this period can be said to have derived from those writers who attempted to forge, sometimes quite self-consciously, new forms of writing incorporating both the older traditions and the new European influences” (Rimer 5). This is a marked departure from the traditional, apprentice-like training of mimicking an established master’s style, and could also signify an ideological shift – at least in the writing community – from a community-oriented nature to more individualistic and arguably Western concerns. Haiku-era writers were self-consciously innovative, and Kawabata similarly forged his own path into creating a modern Japanese narrative voice by engaging with tradition in a modern way. He is “progressive” by the seamless fusion of old and new, East and West, and Kawabata’s own voice was a new form of writing.
This novel, like all of his work, was an experiment in style and form, and Kawabata did not hesitate to amend even already-published versions of this story until he was fully satisfied.
In the Interwar Years, there were “a bewildering variety of influences and counterinfluences on literature written during those two decades” (Rimer 340). This is the period in which Kawabata was first beginning to write, and so it represents the formative years of his writing practice and his mentality as a novelist. Though Snow Country’s serialized construction Grohowski 5 technically extended slightly into the War Years, the majority of the writing, traveling, and researching that Kawabata did while developing this novel fell definitively in this period.
Kawabata is described in Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions as “poetic and sometimes nostalgic” and is listed as one of the writers who “defined for Japanese readers what was
‘modern’ about their literature” (Rimer 341). I would go so far as to add that Kawabata also defined this for international readers, and that he was among the first Japanese novelists to ever do so; Paul Varley confers that “Kawabata is probably more Japanese in what is generally understood as the traditional sense than any other modern novelist” (Varley 313), even though his approach to engaging with tradition was quite innovative.
The War Years was a period that forced writers to take stances, though Kawabata resisted the impulse to make Snow Country political. “Some enthusiastically embraced the conflict and wrote positively about it. Others tried to describe the situation more objectively, and still others retreated into the past, avoiding any mention of the contemporary period at all” (Rimer 659). The
Second World War “is the single most important event in modern Japanese history” (Miyoshi
112), and it had a major influence on the changing the role of the artist in Japan just like it did in other parts of the world at that time. This is evident in the film adaptation of Snow Country: the novel self-consciously avoids placing itself in any particular time, but the film goes to great lengths to integrate political and wartime dialogue into the story, without regard for its effectiveness or lack thereof. Kawabata was peaceful and anti-war, though he was nationalistic after a fashion, and his major work from the Interwar Years reflects a calm detachment from the bustle and rapid modernity that urban Japan was famous for during that time – Snow Country is, in a word, timeless. Grohowski 6
Kawabata’s Snow Country is a remarkable text. In this early novel, Kawabata manages to express many disparate and profound ideas in a highly nuanced way. Even more remarkably, the storytelling method in Snow Country defies nearly every narrative convention of both Eastern and Western standard fictional models. The concepts established in Japanese poetics are favored.
Some background about Kawabata is necessary to understand the complexity of his writing style.
Delving into Kawabata’s writing, life, and ideology, it is quickly apparent that this man is a fascinating case study of how a highly intellectual and introverted Japanese reconciled his deep love for Japan’s traditions with the rapid social pressure to engage with the West in order to progress. To assume that the writer perfectly embodies a traditional Japanese spirit is to see an uninformed half of the full picture – the parts that are missing are all the ways in which
Kawabata goes against the long-established conventions of his country’s beloved traditions. This conflict is where the magic happens in his writing, and perhaps why Kawabata was internationally recognized as the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1968. He “did not show any hatred against things Western,” but that did not affect his “profound love for things Japanese”
(Hirakawa 493). He is complicated and relevant, a twentieth-century product of a country whose identity threatened to fracture under the weight of war, nationalism, and a sudden sense of cultural inferiority.
In spite of his fame as the epitome of the Japanese of his time, Kawabata had a notable background in Western writing and thinking. Early in Kawabata’s life and writing career, he was a distinguished member of the Neo-Perceptionist school, known as “Shin Kankaku Ha” (Miyoshi
96) in Japanese. This group aimed to modernize the Japanese novel after particular European avant-garde movements like dadaism and expressionism. According to Paul Varley, they
“attacked the excessively scientific, clinical approach to literature of both the naturalist and Grohowski 7 proletarian schools and called for a return to purely artistic values and emotional sensitivity in fiction writing” (Varley 298). Kawabata wrote a treatise in 1925 calling for “new perception, new expression, and new style – and strongly emphasiz[ing] the importance of sense perception for the novelist” (97). Though Kawabata quickly moved away from some of the European- centric tenants of this movement, he kept certain aesthetic ideas and translated them into his more Japanese-centric style. In Accomplices of Silence, Masao Miyoshi speculated that
Kawabata realized the true medium to effectuate change was not hidden in existing European traditions, but rather in Japanese ones (98); finding them, however, required Kawabata to broaden his search beyond the realm of what Japanese prose was doing and also look at what
Japanese poetry was doing.
In his introduction to Snow Country, translator Edward Seidensticker discusses and validates Kawabata’s placement “in a literary line that can be traced back to seventeenth-century haiku masters” (qtd. in Kawabata vii). Miyoshi adds renga and waka, other traditional Japanese poetic forms, into the discussion of Kawabata’s literature, remarking that “those arts of suggestion and evocation, reversal and juxtaposition, so deeply rooted in the alogical, intuitive, and ‘irrational’ sensibility of the East itself” allowed a more sincere, culturally inclusive approach to developing a new fictional language “without moving all the way to a distortion of idiomatic Japanese” (Miyoshi 98). Although Neo-Perceptionism perhaps misguidedly promoted
Western aesthetics as the path towards modernization in Japan, it also “taught Kawabata a great deal about the possibilities of Japanese for prose fiction” (100). By the time Kawabata started writing Snow Country in the 1930s, the ideology merely served as a loose inspiration; he was still interested in updating the language conventions in Japanese prose, but in his search for a Grohowski 8 solution to achieve this modernization, Kawabata shifted his focus inwards on Japanese traditions.
It is important to note that the long history of the Japanese novel has always embraced a certain categorical ambiguity when compared with poetry. In his book Japanese Literature: An
Introduction for Western Readers, noted Japanese scholar and Cambridge lecturer Donald Keene explains that “there is no really sharp distinction between the world of poetry and the world of prose, probably because poetry played a more common role in Japanese society than it has ever played in ours” (10). The concerns of Japanese prose are more akin to what lyric poetry strives for in English.
Of all the poetic forms often mentioned in discussions of Kawabata, haiku in particular is an excellent tool for understanding Snow Country. Kawabata’s placement in a lineage of haiku masters is initially surprising; a 175-page novel and a 17-syllable poem seem to share very little common ground. Though the technical demands of these divergent forms may keep them separated, Snow Country does successfully assimilate many details of haiku poetry into its own unique form.
While haiku is known in the West, the nature of its (mis)appropriation into elementary school language arts classes has led to the general dismissal of this form in English as a serious medium for profundity. This very short form relies on the duality of the Japanese language to juxtapose not only the brief images contained in each line with each other, but also the layered meanings of each individual line. Donald Keene offers the following example of a single haiku by Shin Kokinshū which can be read two completely different ways:
The first, the more personal interpretation, might be, “Sadly I long for death. My
heart tormented to see how he, the inconstant one, is weary of me, I am weak as Grohowski 9
the forest dew.” Or, by using another meaning of the sounds, “See how it melts
away, that dew in the wind-swept forest, where the autumn colours are changing!”
Neither of these translations is a full rendering, because in the poet’s mind and
words there is a constant shifting of the two sets of images, so that the dew which
looks as if it soon must be melted away by the autumnal wind becomes one with
the woman who has been abandoned by her bored lover, and who wonders what
keeps her still alive. It is not that the dew is simply being used metaphorically to
describe the woman’s state (and to suggest her tears), for the image of the dew is
used in its full sense of the natural phenomenon in the second rendering of the
poem […]. (Keene 6)
This profound double- or even triple-meaning is what makes the haiku such a powerful emotive form, and its word play on famous phrases makes it a form accessible to the entire Japanese community. “What Japanese poets have most often sought is to create with a few words, usually with a few sharp images, the outline of a work whose details must be supplied by the reader, as in a Japanese painting a few strokes of the brush must suggest a whole world” (Keene 29).
In an examination of the haiku’s form, two things are crucial: the kigo or seasonal reference, and a spiritual evocation created by the language. The kigo was often a standard phrase used by many poets, but such repetition was not condemned as cliché or unambitious;
David Pollack explained that the Japanese are traditionally quite collectivist (102-103). Using these standard kigo was a way to pay respect to the masters of the previous age by giving the phrases new life. The spirituality comes from the form’s juxtapositions, the way the lines collide together to make startling or insightful revelations. In addition, according to Robert Hass, a U.S.
Poet Laureate and Pulitzer recipient, the haiku always has a “location in nature” and “some Grohowski 10 implicit Buddhist reflection on nature” (Hass xiii). For a Westerner to understand the basic principles of Buddhism that apply to the haiku, it is important to understand that “in the Christian sense of things, nature is fallen, and in the Buddhist sense it isn’t” (xiii). Thus, the phrase
“swirling petals, falling leaves” (xiv) is an important religious thought in Japanese culture dealing with the transience of life, and the concept is certainly present in Komako’s snowy despair over being doomed to a life of fleeting relationships with travelers.
The kigo is most frequently placed in the first or third line of a haiku; Snow Country does both. By framing his novel with references to nature, Kawabata accomplishes two things: he shows us how important the wintry season is from the outset with the line “The train came out of the long tunnel and into the snow country” (Kawabata 3), and he expands his understanding of nature to include other aspects of the natural world with his powerful concluding line “As
[Shimamura] caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar” (175). For Kawabata, stars are just as natural as snow and mountains, and so he uses celestial references to the same effect. Paul Varley remarks that “One is […] always keenly aware in a Kawabata novel, as in the poetry by ancient courtier masters, of nature and the seasons, or more precisely, of the particular nature and seasons of Japan that have shaped the temperament of its people” (Varley 313). Though the idiomatic layers of the kigo may seem isolating to non-Japanese speakers, the traditional element forces a certain intimacy with its cultural setting and that actually has a gathering, collective effect within the Japanese community. Shimamura may be merely a visitor to the snow country, but he seems to always be on the outside looking longingly in at the gathering effect – such as in the ending scene, when he happened to be out walking along the outskirts of town and came back to find the community had banded together to extinguish the fire. Perhaps his attachment to nature over the course of Grohowski 11 the novel is an effort to connect with the local people and the Japanese heritage that he believes – and that they would have him believe – they represent.
Moods are also a critical part of any discussion of haiku in English, as this is actually a cultural gap between Japan and the West that cause English people to read and interpret meaning differently. Hass explains:
Though the melancholy of autumn is as traditional an experience in European
poetry as it is Japanese, it is not fundamentally assimilated into the European
system of thought. English poets […] called [these feelings] ‘moods.’ When
Wordsworth or Keats writes about being ‘in pensive or in wayward mood,’ you
know that they’re doing one of the jobs of the artist, trying to assimilate
psychological states for which the official culture didn’t have a language. Bashō’s
Japan did. (Hass xiii-xiv)
Artistry was always linked with the spiritual in some way for the Japanese, but the way it is expressed – as in through frequent allusions to the natural world – is often mistaken in the West as a mere sensitivity to nature. The Japanese are particularly attached to nature beyond even what
Zen Buddhism encourages, and that attachment is owed to their second prominent religion,
Shintō. This religion is exclusive to the Japanese islands and is based around the worship of ancestors and the country’s soil. Shrines were built all over Japan to draw attention to the beauty of the natural world. Though “there is no creator-being in Buddhist cosmology” (Hass xiii), the
Japanese emperor was considered divine in the Shintō faith; however, even more fundamentally than that, the Japanese people felt their spirituality most keenly through a connection with nature, the seasons, and the transient beauty all around them. This sensibility is known in Japanese as mono no aware. Grohowski 12
As Seidensticker notes, “the classical haiku characteristically fuses motion and stillness” and “relies very heavily on a mingling of the senses” (qtd. in Kawabata vii). He provides the example of when “the sound of a bell, far back in the singing of a teakettle, suddenly becomes a woman’s feet” (vii-viii). Of course, the iconic train sequence in the opening chapter is also a perfect supporting example of the novel’s peculiar juxtapositions, as its primary image is Yoko’s stationary reflection superimposed over the disappearing scenery visible through the boxcar window:
The girl’s face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains. It was then
that a light shone in the face. The reflection in the mirror was not strong enough
to blot out the light outside, nor was the light strong enough to dim the reflection.
The light moved across the face, though not to light it up. 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 10)
This imagery is beautiful and very visual, but it also symbolically suggests that Shimamura is superimposing his own dreamscape or idealism atop the natural scenes in the snow country.
Understanding something about traditional Japanese linked-verse poetry is an important step towards grasping the structure of Kawabata’s novel. This is a longer structure from which the more modern haiku was gleaned – the hokku, or first stanza of a linked-verse poem, is structurally the same as a haiku but was designed to continue into subsequent stanzas. Each section of a linked-verse poem had particular rules, like syllable counts and concluding parts of speech, and each section was written by a different poet. The resulting compositional effect is fascinating: adjacent parts are interrelated, but more distant sections of the poem might have Grohowski 13 nothing in common. This effect, coupled with the highly restrictive rules about subject matter and even specific content, created an inherently lyrical and emotional style which is absolutely present in Snow Country. The unifying threads of the novel are not plot and character drama, as we might expect in the West, but rather an underlying sense of awe towards the natural world which adds depth and color to the human action. Of the lyricism of linked verse, Keene explains that “as long as each verse fitted securely into the next, and the poetry was maintained at a high evocative level, there was no need for a carefully worked-out beginning, middle and end, a development and a climax, or any such requirement” (45-46). This is truly informative, as it offers an explanation to several intercultural conundrums that may come up for Western readers.
The serialized writing and publication process of Snow Country created a form which defies standard narrative and genre molds, both from the West and from Japan, and this unusual result is a metaphor for the beauty and abruptness of nature. “Each section is, to a large extent, autonomous, carrying a peculiar sense of completeness, yet open-endedness […]. This non-
Aristotelian aspect of his work must always be taken into account in any talk about Kawabata”
(Miyoshi 113). It seems to be a quality shared by many Japanese novels which, influenced perhaps by their close relationship with poetry, “tend to break up into almost entirely disconnected incidents in the manner of the old poetry-tales” and commonly contain “digressions of no apparent relevance” (Keene 10). Miyoshi reiterates multiple times that Kawabata’s stories could have ended at any point along the way and the story would be no more or less complete.
This is a sentiment which Seidensticker seems to share, as he remarks in his introduction to Snow
Country that the story does not conclude – rather, it simply ceases. There are no moral conclusions reached, there is no driving plot to tie up, there is no major conflict to resolve, and Grohowski 14 so there are no applicable requirements about what the novel must contain or accomplish before it finishes.
First of all, it is quite clear while reading through this novel that many pieces behave differently than those trained in the Western tradition might expect. One great example of this is the chijimi interlude towards the end of the novel. Chijimi is an expensive textile entirely created in the snow and Shimamura, who was academically interested in its process, decided to visit the area where it was created. Compositionally, this is an odd choice, as the long episode plays out within pages of the novel’s ending. In a plot-focused novel, this interlude would never occur.
However, in a thematically-driven novel like Snow Country, the creation of this regionally- exclusive linen could not be more appropriate. It balances the coolness of the fabric itself and the snow in which it is fashioned against the burning heat of the fire scene at the end of the novel. It provides Shimamura with a way to go out into nature, to visit a town where snow piled so high in the streets that “Tunnels were cut through for passage from one side to the other” (156).
To further develop the similarity of this section to a linked-verse poem, let’s look at its opening transition. The passage right before the interlude reads:
He had not dreamed that she was a woman who would find it necessary to take
offense at such a trivial remark, and that very fact lent her an irresistible sadness.
The mountains, more distant each day as the russet of the autumn leaves had
darkened, came brightly back to life with the snow. The cedars, under a thin
coating of snow, rose sheer from the white ground to the sky, each cut off sharply
from the rest. (150)
And the passage right after the section break reads: Grohowski 15
The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the
snow, and bleached in the snow. Everything, from the first spinning of the thread
to the last finishing touches, was done in the snow. ‘There is Chijimi linen
because there is snow,’ someone wrote long ago. ‘Snow is the mother of Chijimi.’
(150)
The connection between the two pieces is obvious through this small sample. Thematically,
Shimamura begins to engage with nature in the first passage after his failed interaction with
Komako of a moment before, and the snow in his vista carries over into the chijimi passage. It is a stream-of-consciousness connection, wherein the origin of thoughts are related but the actual topics may have very little in common.
There is a drive in Western writing and reading towards standard plots and structures, and this is something that even translators rely on and, in some cases, fall prey to. In his preface,
Seidensticker summarizes the plot of the novel in terms of the standard Aristotelian structure that is common in Western novels, and in so doing identifies a climax, the force that drives the traditional plot. But this second conundrum posed to Western readers is actually a twofold result of a mistake Seidensticker made in his translation of the passage, a mistake which caused him to make careless and misleading assumptions that reveal his Western bias. Though it was only ever his opinion, it is challenging to refute outright due to the barrier of translation and the inherent trust that I must have in Seidensticker’s accuracy. In support of my disagreement with
Seidensticker’s attempt to force Snow Country into a Western model, however, Masao Miyoshi, a scholar who has read Yukiguni in Japanese, has some incredibly intriguing insight:
Shimamura’s behavior toward Komako, too, is left suspended finally in the
novel’s attitudinal limbo. Take the celebrated passage where he tells her that she Grohowski 16
is a ‘good girl.’ […] He repeats his remark, but with a variation: ‘you’re a good
woman.’ Many critics in discussing this change argue that Shimamura
inadvertently reveals in his second remark his real attitude toward Komako as a
mere sexual object. But there is no evidence for this. Besides being genuinely
attracted to the girl, Shimamura is fully sensitive to the moral implications of his
relationship. He knows he will never marry her and he feels some guilt about this,
even if he never acts on it. There is overall a kind of neutrality in the book
regarding Shimamura’s character which a ‘moral’ interpretation is bound to
misrepresent. (108-109)
And then, in a Note to Chapter IV, Miyoshi expands his counterargument:
Edward Seidensticker and Howard Hibbett both discuss [the ‘good girl’] passage
as a crucial one […]. But Thomas E. Swann imposes a coherent moral reading
based on the passage. As I see it, Shimamura rephrases ‘a good girl’ into ‘a good
woman’ at the point where ‘the awareness of a woman’s being alive [comes] to
[him] in her warmth.’ That is, he now recognizes Komako as a fully mature
woman rather than a young girl. Komako misunderstands him as implying that
she is a sexual object (as Swann says she understands this), although her angry
reaction also involves annoyance at being taken as an older, experienced woman.
Being a young girl (that is, inexperienced and innocent) is a source of pride for
Komako as well as pleasure for Shimamura, and for Kawabata. All this
misinterpretation may have arisen from Seidensticker’s mistake in translating a
sentence later on: ‘Shimamura felt a stabbing in his chest as he saw what the
mistake had been. He lay silent, his eyes closed.’ This should read: ‘Shimamura Grohowski 17
felt a stabbing in his chest as he saw what Komako’s misunderstanding had been,
but he lay silent, his eyes closed.’ (Miyoshi 186-187)
It is clear from Miyoshi’s elucidation that Seidensticker’s greatest support was his own mistranslation of the text. The heavily segmented and serialized nature of this novel makes it truly impossible to pinion into a Western formal structure – any attempt to do so would undermine the nuances of Kawabata’s writing. The urge to force formal unity over the episodes in Snow Country detracts from the independence of each episode, and that urge is perhaps the result of a limited acceptance in the West of what qualifies as a novel.
Continuing to defy Western expectations, for Kawabata, there is little to nothing in the characters’ stories that can match the transpirations of the natural world. Snow Country manages to reverse the idea that human action takes place in the foreground while nature lingers in the background; in this novel, the seasons take center stage and mountains, dragonflies, and gusts of wind are far more alluring than the human drama. Take, for instance, when Shimamura remembers “that he had had money telegraphed from Tokyo” and left the inn with the intention of retrieving it, “But at the door of the inn he was seduced by the mountain, strong with the smell of new leaves [and] He started climbing roughly up it” (Kawabata 29). This interlude quickly transforms Shimamura from his restless apathy of a mere page earlier, when “It seemed almost too much of an effort to talk” (29) to the young geisha as social customs dictated. Words like
“glum silence,” “pains,” and “heavier” were replaced with “laugh,” “pleasantly,” and “funny,” and the forced stillness of the social setting was abandoned for “climbing roughly” and running
“headlong back down the slope” (28-29). Kawabata’s message is clear: nature brings a vibrancy and freedom to Shimamura that no prescribed social interaction could, and this aloof character ultimately finds more solace in nature than he ever does with Komako. It is interesting that Grohowski 18
Shimamura maintains the belief that Komako – the physical embodiment of the snow country, the person that only the forefinger of his left “hand seemed to have a vital and immediate memory of” (Kawabata 7) – is the source of his comfort, and could suggest that he is being pulled by two separate impulses: that of Western romanticism and the traditional quasi-religious tenets of his own culture.
When Kawabata was nominated for and ultimately won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1968, three of his novels were referenced in particular: Thousand Cranes, The Dancing Girl of
Izu, and Snow Country. The Nobel Prize motivation declares that it is bestowed “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind” (Frangsmyr).
Snow Country was published over more than a decade in several installments. The first piece of the final novel appeared in 1935, and four more publications added to and edited the original short story until the current form of the novel was reached in the late 1940s. The finished product that is now standard is of course internationally renowned, but some of its earlier iterations were also critically acclaimed in Japan as early as 1937. Miho Matsugo, a rising Kawabata scholar of the past decade, poses a keen question in his dissertation: “What urgent conditions prompted
Kawabata to rewrite a novel which critics and readers already praised as a masterpiece? Most writers would not want to take the chance” (166). Kawabata himself offered some public justification relating to the construction of the novel and his dissatisfaction “with the
‘correspondence’ (shō) between the opening and the ending scenes in the 1937 Snow Country. If the novel starts with the narrator guiding readers to look down at the earth after coming out from the long tunnel, Kawabata thought, it should end by looking up at the sky” (Matsugo 162-163). Grohowski 19
Once Kawabata’s novel had assumed its final form in 1948, the renowned Japanese scholar and translator, Edward Seidensticker, heavily collaborated with Kawabata, his friend and mentor, to publish an English translation in the 1950s. A famous anecdote in Seidensticker’s obituary reads as follows:
“Do you not, my esteemed master, find this a rather impenetrable passage?” Mr.
Seidensticker recalled asking him, ever so gently, during the translation of Snow
Country. “He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: ‘Yes,’ ” Mr.
Seidensticker wrote. “Nothing more.” (Fox)
In keeping with the anecdote, Kawabata’s novel thrives on its abstract, imagistic prose. Like frames on a strip of film, the connecting flesh is so often absent from the novel – the connections must be drawn based off of the juxtaposition of the images.
This artistic impenetrability is furthered by Japanese conversational structures, whose fragmented-ness can seem to obscure the subject or object in a conversation. This is mostly a cultural difference between the speech patterns of English and Japanese; in English, it is necessary to restate the subject many times in order to be perfectly clear to what or whom one is referring and, when in doubt, clarity is always preferred over obscurity, but in Japanese, much of a conversation is driven by inference. For example, after naming the subject of conversation once, that subject is understood to carry on through the remainder of the conversation until the subject changes – the pronoun or proper name is not necessary to rearticulate every sentence, as the conjugation of the verb implies that the subject carries over. Furthermore, long passages of dialogue – which can feel quite labyrinthine in English – are actually quite clear in Japanese because of the gendered nuances of the language. Women use certain participles at the end of sentences, which actually serve as an implied “she said” in dialogue throughout the novel. Grohowski 20
Kawabata would certainly have made use of the subtleties of his language, as exemplified by the haiku with two completely different meanings, but this quality is perhaps impossible to translate completely into English.
It is not only an issue of linguistic and cultural translation that causes Snow Country to feel ambiguous; the text in Japanese is also quite vague, but it is an ambiguity that the Japanese aesthetic is more comfortable with – as aforementioned, the aim of haiku was to “create with a few words […] the outline of a work whose details must be supplied by the reader” (Keene 29).
The ambiguity of his highly imagistic writing is perhaps what led scholars to liken Kawabata to
Bashō and other legendary haiku masters, for haiku by its very nature depends on the elision of disparate images which suggest an overarching meaning. Haiku is too momentary to deal with temporal leaps, but Kawabata’s novel opens up those possibilities. The episodic nature of Snow
Country – both in how it came gradually into public life and in the prose itself – functions like an expanded haiku, as it goes into extreme detail where imagery is concerned but extends little effort to come to a grandiose conclusion about them. This marks an important distinction between Kawabata’s Japanese mode of thought and the English mode of thought about narrative: for Kawabata, the images were the most important part, and that is where the spirit of his writing comes to life. Haiku, for all their brevity, “have unusual wakefulness and clarity” (Hass xvi) because of the way they arrive at their meaning. They do not force a conclusion, but rather suggest one gently.
It is also interesting that the novel is split into two parts; in spite of the many forms taken by various published versions of the text and in blatant defiance of the segmented-ness of the story within each part, Kawabata somehow imagined two overarching parts. Perhaps the best explanation turns to renga and the ancient art of linked poetry. The pieces of a linked poem must Grohowski 21 bear some resemblance to adjacent sections at their point of transition, but the relationship between parts that do not touch does not need to be clear at all. In this way, longer poetic forms did not concern themselves with any large-scale structural unity – what mattered the most was unity of emotion and expression on a small scale. Donald Keene offers an example through the
Japanese visual art of the horizontal scroll, or emakimono:
As we unroll one of the scrolls with our left hand we simultaneously roll up a
correspondingly long section with our right hand. No matter which segment of the
scroll we see at one time, it makes a beautiful composition, although when we
examine it as a whole it possesses no more unity than a river landscape seen from
a moving boat. Linked-verse at its best produces a somewhat similar effect.
(Japanese Literature 37)
To offer an interpretation of how the two large parts of Snow Country might complement each other, it can be reduced to temporal leaps in the first section, which begins in medias res and moves quite rapidly – and confusingly – between flashbacks and the present action, and spatial leaps in the second section, which notably contains the chijimi episode as a prominent aside.
Another way in which Eastern and Western thought are remarkably divergent is shown in the ideological contrast of collectivism and individualism. Discussing the subject of the criticism of Kawabata’s “passive” characters, a long quote from scholar David Pollack puts it best:
[The] actions, affinities, and fates of Kawabata’s characters are determined by
forces so completely beyond their control that these characters appear to the
Western reader almost pathologically passive and irresolute. To say this, however,
is only to note the obvious fact that […] there is not much room afforded in
modern Japanese society – or […] much need felt – for what we [Westerners] are Grohowski 22
accustomed to think of as an inherently human striving for individual self-
determination. This does not mean that such characters as Kikuji and Shimamura
in Snow Country are therefore helplessly ‘passive’; rather, they simply accept and
live within the reality that their lives are already determined largely, perhaps
entirely, by forces beyond their control. (102)
Pollack continues by comparing Kawabata’s characters to Jane Austen’s characters who “find their lives similarly constrained by a society that does not tolerate fidgety and flighty females or males.” He notes “In the end, …Shimamura will remain married, and Komako will be as happy or unhappy as her condition permits. These are simply the givens within which their lives are acted out” (102).
Pollack attributes this Western view with our Romantic heritage, which, he writes, “leads us to expect them to hurl themselves against that fate and die” (103). This makes Westerners
“less inclined than others may be to recognize the degree to which our own lives are, like those of these characters, determined by conditions over which we have so little control” (103).
The narrative mythos of Romanticism is founded upon this very blindness, this
willed refusal of creative genius to acknowledge the annihilating power of dumb
fate in lives inevitably destined to be lived out and ended within the narrow
compass of a few repetitive patterns. (Pollack 102-103)
Pollack’s discussion of the “Romantic heritage” of contemporary Western people elucidates a core cultural divide separating the underlying principles of Snow Country from a modern American reader. It also points to another important issue: that this and other fundamental differences between the silent culture expressed in Kawabata’s novel and that which the Western reader brings to the table may cause that reader to make assumptions that are not Grohowski 23 culturally informed, and those could lead to a culturally uneducated reading of the text. The passivity that Pollack mentions is perhaps merely the result of the Japanese literary aesthetic; as
Keene points out, Japanese poetry functions by “its power of suggestion” and relies on the reader to complete the poem, creating an effect which seems “curiously passive to us, for the writer does not specify the truth taught him by an experience, nor even in what way it affected him”
(28-29). This is not to say that there is only one correct way to read Snow Country; in fact, the intriguing dual-nature of the text in translation brings an entirely different group of readers
“completing” the work, as it invites us to do, who have little knowledge of elements that may have informed the original authorial intent of the novel.
As a result of its open-ended quality lent by the absence of Western formal constraints,
Snow Country tells a more genuine human story than most novels do; real human lives are not full of moralizing end-stops, and the content of the plot is not in any way dictated by the conventions of the form. As Pollack articulated, for Western audiences, this kind of storytelling seems not to be “worthy of reflection in fiction” (Pollack 103). Snow Country is constantly working, either consciously or unconsciously, to subvert any moral or logical shape that a reader might try to force the story to take. The unconventional poetic novel may not fit into a delineated box of any genre, but it is still a whole piece of art and strikingly beautiful. It gives a sense that the composition is fleeting, that what beauty it possesses is tenuous and coincidental, and this is the very same feeling that defines mono no aware for Kawabata.
The fact that Kawabata is more interested in nature than the human action of this novel has created a unique result in Snow Country. The novel does not operate on ordinary novelistic logic. Rather, the play and performance of the images and their settings – whether related or Grohowski 24 unrelated to the characters – animate and move the novel. A pertinent quote by Hirakawa puts it best:
People generally believe that it is plot that runs through a novel, but in [works] by
Kawabata it is sensibility, which is in the end the unifying principle. Affective
stimuli come from various sources, and the […] characters respond to them […].
These interactions form the interest of the novel. The capacity of the readers to be
affected and understand is also put to the test. Those who understand mono no
aware will follow not the plot or outline of the story, but the half-hidden thread
which gives [the] work an admirable wholeness. (498)
He goes on to assert that “Some seasonal elements, with their half-hidden implications, affect so much the main characters in the novel that they should be considered something more than a mere background” (498). This is certainly true in Snow Country, whose seasonal references are so critical to the thematic success of the work that they appear in the novel’s title, its first line, and nearly every one of its major images throughout the work.
Kawabata’s narrative is episodic and sparse and non-linear, lacking the overly defined connective tissue between scenes that Western fiction is known for. In many instances, the imagery in Kawabata’s writing feels more like expanded poetry than novelistic fiction. Take, for example, the opening scene of Snow Country. Pages are devoted to the exact description of an image, which is Shimamura watching Yoko’s portrait semi-reflected on the window of a train and observing how it begins to fuse with the passing mountain landscape on the other side of the glass. This trance-like stillness of the narrative might, by some Western criteria, seem superfluous or digressing from the narrative, but the true effect in Kawabata’s novel is to Grohowski 25 introduce a dream-like blurring of reality and imagination in which deliberate symbolism is utterly vital, which sets a marvelous tone for the unfolding of the rest of the story.
The opening passage of the novel is fundamentally one extended image. A poet like
Coleridge or Keats might have expressed as much in a single, highly condensed line of poetry, but Kawabata does not rush where his meaning must be explicit. His descriptions are very nuanced, down to “the way [Yoko’s] strength was gathered in her shoulders [suggested that the] fierceness in her eyes was but a sign of an intentness that did not permit her to blink” (Kawabata
8). This extreme detail is the core of Kawabata’s style. It is poetic language and arguably even poetic subject matter, but it is also sprawling and developing like prose. These small details are crucial in grounding the mysterious Yoko into some realistic framework. Ultimately, this rare piece of characterization is the connecting tissue to a point later in the novel: it validates Yoko’s enigmatic assertions that she wanted to be a nurse but could no longer do so because Yukio had died and “there has only been one man [she] could ever nurse” (137).
Yoko may be the stuff of dreams to Shimamura, but dreams and reveries are important to his own characterization. This character is a self-proclaimed expert on Western ballet, but he refuses “to study the ballet” in performance because “he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination” and used his “research” to indulge a “free, uncontrolled fantasy” (25). This same attitude drew Shimamura to make the following insightful aside:
Shimamura was haunted by that glance, burning just in front of his forehead. 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 Grohowski 26
with snow, and Komako’s red cheeks floating in the middle of it. […] Always
ready to give himself up to reverie, he could not believe that the mirror floating
over the evening scenery and the other snowy mirror were really works of man.
They were part of nature, and part of some distant world. (57)
For Shimamura, the demands of his everyday life – though admittedly constraints that he chooses to accept – cannot hold his interest like his own imagination can, and the poetic experiences of the natural world provide a sort of divine permission to enable his own dreaming.
He can come and go from the snow country whenever he desires, as he can do with reveries, and so his relationship with nature and with Yoko are marked by a strident, inherent male privilege.
A similar example is found towards the end of the novel when Shimamura is seen “translating
Valéry and Alain and French treatises on the dance from the golden age of the Russian ballet” in order to publish “a small luxury edition at his own expense.” The novel candidly expresses that
“The book would […] contribute nothing to the Japanese dancing world” but Shimamura delighted in the irrelevance of “his sad little dream world” all the same (131).
Silence is also a tool that Kawabata puts to good use in Snow Country. “White blanks left unstated are like the invisible part of an iceberg. We know that something is there underwater, as we see its upper part, and those who understand mono no aware guess the underwater parts of
Kawabata’s imagery. These white blanks are sometimes more eloquent than words” (Hirakawa
512). This is a truly profound analogy. In Snow Country, Hirakawa’s insight is illustrated most keenly when Komako struggles with herself and “bit[es] savagely at her arm, as though angered by its refusal to serve her” (Kawabata 35). After this episode, “Shimamura drew back startled.
There were deep teeth-marks on her arm” (35), but this marks the closing of Komako’s emotional vulnerability. She becomes suddenly compliant to Shimamura’s physical demands, but Grohowski 27 more shockingly she becomes blindly positive, repeating “Everything is all right” in a serene voice (35). The “white blank” in this sequence is the true motive for Komako’s self-directed violence; Shimamura suggests an interpretation with “as though angered by its refusal to serve her,” but this is only the product of the male authority figure’s attempt to rationalize what seems to be the irrational behavior of a woman. Her own genuine explanation is never offered nor explored, in this or any scene – Shimamura is the only mind we get to see from the inside. This makes Snow Country interesting source material for the male gaze. The female perspective occupies much the same place as nature and the seasons in the novel: both are suggested through imagery, but an understanding of mono no aware is necessary in breaching the deeper implications of either. The novel gives Komako and Yoko a silent space to inhabit, and it is in this silence that femininity blossoms.
Miyoshi offers a slightly different interpretation of Kawabata’s blank spaces and suppression of the human story, professing the belief that “Kawabata is ultimately indifferent to moral considerations in art.” Relating this assertion to Kawabata’s deep love for nature, Miyoshi explains that “He will always, for instance, shift the narrative line so that the human action or situation is implicitly compared with a natural object or event which has in itself no single definite meaning at all, though it may be powerfully evocative of certain emotions” (Miyoshi
109). If this is true, then Kawabata has actually fully accepted two rather radical things for a
Westerner to consider: that individuals do not need to revolt against the cards dealt to them by fate or a constraining society in order to lead wholesome lives, as David Pollack suggests, and also that the action and behavior of the human species is merely another meaningless act of nature in the grand scheme of the universe. Miyoshi explains that the digressions into nature- based imagery Grohowski 28
are there not so much to interpret and comment on the hero’s action as to break
the line of the story, or drop a hint that no matter what the characters may be up
to, the world around them is always present but uninvolved, insensible, and not
really attended to often enough. [Kawabata] reminds us to stop and look. The kind
of resigned sadness one always feels in Kawabata’s novels comes, it seems to me,
from his acceptance of man’s helplessness before such a comprehensive flow of
things in time. It is not all sadness, of course, because Kawabata finds quiet
pleasure in this acceptance. (Miyoshi 109-110)
Snow Country is dense and sometimes abrupt in its maneuvers between images and scenes, and its short length does nothing to alleviate the complexity of how the various pieces are sutured together. It is clear that Kawabata’s method is directly borrowed from haiku traditions.
Connections are suggested in Japanese poetry, but little is said outright; Kawabata’s writing is consistent with this cultural tradition. David Pollack keenly remarks that “‘art’ becomes interchangeable with ‘reality’” in Kawabata’s practice. The serialized publication of multiple semi-autonomous parts, the lack of firm relational characterization, and the imagistic sequences that do not provide moral closure to the human drama are all “like a series of brief flashes in a void” (Kawabata viii). In all cases, the natural world reigns supreme in Snow Country and the human action is secondary and irrelevant. The inevitability of the seasons is a much more powerful force in this novel than the characters’ fleeting lives – especially when nature’s constancy is juxtaposed so starkly against Komako’s loud drunkenness and Shimamura’s flightiness in returning to visit when he says he will. Grohowski 29
Furthering the importance of nature and an appreciation of mono no aware, the concept that Kawabata himself mentioned several times during his Nobel Lecture in 1968, with Snow
Country, Kawabata has fashioned a sort of tribute to nature’s aleatoric beauty. The text not only documents the loveliness of life’s “transience, contingence, and suffering” (Hass xiii), it also mimics it in its form. Scenes which are seemingly irrelevant to the plot are often actually among the text’s more profound moments and the lack of central conflict means there is nothing to truly resolve, so the story’s ending does not need to be in any one place, per se. There is a feeling of ceaselessness to this tale; we have looked through a window and observed part of a picture, but there is more beyond the frame that is just slightly out of view. Snow Country is not a world which only exists within the novel.
In a culture where nature is divine and perfect in a way we can only glimpse at, it is sensible that Shimamura and Komako do not revolt against their fates as if they were in a
Western melodrama. What could two flawed humans presume to know that could undermine the perfect imperfection of natural world they inhabited? There will be no raging against the dying of the light for these characters, and that collectivist ideology also serves to glorify nature in the text.
Snow Country is a succinct and powerful picture of Kawabata’s mind, and it was justifiably awarded the highest praise as a modern emblem of the traditional Japanese sensibility.
Grohowski 30
Works Cited
Asenlund, Dan. "In Kawabata's Footsteps to 'Snow Country.'" The Japan Times [Tokyo, Japan] 4
Jan. 2015, Travel: 5pp. NewsBank. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. resources/doc/nb/news/152A34CAF8366568?p=AWNB>. Fox, Margalit. "Edward Seidensticker, Translator, Is Dead at 86." New York Times [New York] 31 Aug. 2007, Arts. The New York Times. Web. 9 Sept. 2015. Frangsmyr, Tore, and Sture Allen, eds. Nobel Lectures in Literature: 1968-1980. Singapore: World Scientific, 1993. Print. Hass, Robert, ed. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. New York: Ecco, 1994. Print. Hirakawa, Sukehiro. Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with the West. N.p.: Global Oriental, 2005. Print. Hoffmann, Yoel, comp. Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1986. Print. Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. International ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print. Keene, Donald. Japanese Literature. New York: Grove Press, 1955. Print. Matsugo, Miho. "The Birth of the Lyrical Novel: What Kawabata Has to Say.” The War in Kawabata's Snow Country: Aesthetics of Empire, Politics of Literature, Struggle of Women. Diss. University of Chicago, 2005. Print. Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Print. Grohowski 31 Pollack, David. "The Ideology of Aesthetics: Yasunari Kawabata's Thousand Cranes and Snow Country." Reading Against Culture: Ideology and Narrative in the Japanese Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. 100-20. Print. Rimer, J. Thomas. Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Print. Ueda, Makoto, ed. The Mother of Dreams: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2004. Print.