/lit/ - Literature

Snow Country - Kawabata

There's a very unique and palpable tinge of romanticism present in all the Japanese literature I've read. The rippled folds of the geishas' kimono; the delicate, methodical peeling of a persimmon, the frequent "I have lived a life of much shame" 's before getting NTR'd by your sweet asian wife.

I found myself thinking of this book quite a bit lately, vivid recollections of the sparse, frigid inn-town Kawabata depicts, in just as sparse prose. The gregarious ripple of mountain, the pristine sheet of snow. Vermilion flowers adorning the white. The rosy-cheeked girl selling garments, the shimmering stones that bordered the town's houses. A pale face, apparated atop the hued window, a phantom superimposed upon the falling snow.

We don't get too attached to the the focal center of the novel, Shimamura; rather, hovering besides him, a slight ways off. Consequently the reader is as much an outsider to him as Komako, perhaps even more so. He's clearly worn and cynical, but his past is deliberately denied exposition, because it doesn't matter. His trysts in the Snow Country, on the other hand, do. This maltreatment of the reader is well deserved, because it preserves a sense of separation and individualization of the reader from Komako and Shimamura, who are already cryptic enough in their interactions. It is not our place to niggle at the crevices of themselves they fumble to obscure, and it is this alienation from them that makes it seem all the more human and self-contained entities. All the more poignant when Komako's misdirected desperation pierces through the veil, or Shimamura's quiet apathy becomes painfully apparent.

The end is in itself painfully hollow, and all the more striking for it. It seems to be the last in the chain of the events we witness, as opposed to the resolution of the chain itself. There, when Yoko lies in a delicate sprawl, unmoving, besides the burning embers of the theater, it when the novel cuts o-