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Mono No Aware: Nature and Aesthetics in Kawabata's Snow Country

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Mono No Aware: Nature and Aesthetics in Kawabata's Snow Country 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.
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