My uncle Alasdair kept the books for a firm of grain merchants in Leith for forty-one years, and kept a biscuit tin on his kitchen dresser for rather longer than that. The tin held railway cuttings. There were timetables for Alpine lines, a photograph of a red train crossing a viaduct above a snowbound valley, and a pamphlet on clearing drifts from the Engadine passes that he had sent off for in 1962 and, I believe, read every winter since. He had never been to Switzerland. He had scarcely been south of Carlisle. When my father, who was generous in the way of men who do not ask questions, offered to pay for the journey, Alasdair thanked him warmly and said he would think about it. He thought about it until he died. As a boy I took this for a failure of nerve. I now think it was a method, and I did not understand the method until I read Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, whose hero is my uncle with a private income and a worse conscience.
Snow Country, Yukiguni in Japanese, began to appear in magazines in 1935. It was collected as one book in 1937, and Kawabata went on revising and extending it after the war, so that the book we read is less one act of composition than a long, patient accretion. The story can be told in a breath. Shimamura, a man of independent means from Tokyo, with a wife and children left offstage, travels to a hot-spring town in the snowbound mountains, which the novel never names and which readers have long identified with Yuzawa in Niigata. He goes to see Komako, a geisha who loves him a good deal more than he is prepared to be loved. He goes three times, in three seasons. On the train a second young woman, Yoko, tends a sick man, and she turns up again in the town. A fire ends the book. That is nearly all the plot there is. D. J. Enright, reviewing Edward Seidensticker's translation in the New York Review of Books in 1969, called it thin to the point of emaciation, and, as I read him, did not hold that against it.
The first sentence is the best place to see what the book is doing. In Japanese it reads Kokkyo no nagai tonneru o nukeru to yukiguni de atta, and it has no subject. Nothing is said to come out of the tunnel. Seidensticker's English begins 'The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country', which is a fine sentence and a different one, because English insists that something must leave the tunnel, and so he supplied the train. A literal English version would have read like a riddle, and I do not blame him for declining to set one. In Kawabata's text the train does not appear until the third sentence. In the Japanese one comes out of the tunnel without being anyone in particular. The second sentence adds to the effect: it says that the bottom of the night had turned white, and Seidensticker, again sensibly, has the earth lying white beneath the night sky. A Korean opinion column in the news outlet Newstomato quotes a Korean version of the opening. There the first sentence likewise has no subject and the train turns up only in the third, since Korean, like Japanese, lets a speaker drop whatever the listener can supply. I mention it because anyone who reads these literatures in English is reading, at every line, someone's decisions about what to supply.
The book's first image is of looking at a person by looking at glass. As the evening train runs on into the snow country, Shimamura watches Yoko not directly but through her reflection in the window. As I remember the scene, the lights of the dark country outside drift across her reflected face. Heather Bowen-Struyk, in a 2000 paper on the novel and capitalism, describes this as a strange mirror, using the novel's own phrase, and treats it as the device through which Shimamura first takes in the snow country. The first fragment Kawabata published, in January 1935, was named for the same object, if I read the Japanese title correctly: 'The Mirror of the Evening Scene'. The whole novel grows from one habit of vision, which is to prefer the reflection to the face, because a reflection does not look back.
What Shimamura does with his idleness is the book's best joke. He writes about Western ballet. He has never seen a Western ballet performed, so he works from books and photographs, and he calls the result research. I understand that he began as a student of the Japanese stage and abandoned it for the foreign art. That looks to me like the move of a man who would sooner not be answered back: a living theatre contradicts its student, whereas a theatre one can only read about is perfectly obliging. Scholars have been unkind about the enterprise. Bowen-Struyk reads it as armchair fantasy. Enright found Shimamura cold and sterile, an aesthete who creates nothing, and observed that Shimamura knows it himself, which makes the portrait deliberate and not satirical. Kawabata does not rescue him. He allows him his fantasy, his private income and his train ticket, and he lets Komako say what she thinks of him. She is not given to tact, and tells him in so many words that he has plenty of money and is not much of a person.
Komako is his opposite in nearly everything except this. She is a geisha in a mountain town, with a living to earn and obligations that are not all her own, and she talks to Shimamura, cheerfully and at length, about films and plays she has never seen. Enright noticed in 1969 that her talk resembles his fantasies about ballet, and I think that observation is the hinge of the book. They are two people discussing arts neither has seen, and each is the other's only audience. Komako also keeps written summaries of the novels she reads, and when Shimamura calls the habit a waste of effort she agrees at once. He knows perfectly well that it is untrue of her, and is pleased by the idea all the same, because it seems to him to purify her. On Bowen-Struyk's account he has found his word for what he admires in her, which is effort that leads nowhere, and he applies it to mountaineering and to her labour alike. She lodges, as it happens, in a room where silkworms were once kept. The detail is mentioned only in passing, and the scholar who notices it reads it as a comment on how the house regards her.
The snow country itself is made of such effort. Cloth keeps turning up in the novel, and the cloth is chijimi, a fine linen that mountain women worked at through the long snowbound months. Shimamura prizes it, and wants his old kimonos rebleached in the region where it is made. When he visits the place he finds that the weavers' lives were far from as bright as their cloth. An old book on the subject, as the novel reports it, admits that the making of it was never practical in economic terms. The narrator observes that the makers are long dead and only the cloth remains, a plaything for men like Shimamura. Komako's love, the narrator says, will leave nothing so definite behind it as a piece of chijimi. Robert Burns, who knew a thing or two about the economy of pleasure, compared pleasures in Tam o' Shanter to snow falling into a river, white for a moment and then gone for ever. Burns draws a moral, and Tam rides home on a mare that has lost her tail. Kawabata draws none. He sets the melting in front of us and lets us watch, and it takes a while to notice who else is watching.
I came to the book as most English-speaking readers have, in Seidensticker's translation, which by the logic of this essay makes me a relation of Shimamura's. I do not entirely accept the verdict. Reading a literature at one remove is not a vice but a condition, and the old objection that a foreigner cannot love what he reads in another man's English has never struck me as quite foolish, nor as quite fatal. On this blog I read some Korean books in the original, with effort, and others only through their translators, and the two experiences are not alike; the second always carries a faint sense of a room entered by the side door. Shimamura's failing is not that he loves at a remove; it is that he prefers the remove. My uncle's biscuit tin made the same distinction without being asked. A translation is a remove one admits to, with its seams on show, and Enright, for one, thought Seidensticker's skill plain to see in this book. It is often said that the translation did much to carry Kawabata to Stockholm. I cannot weigh the claim, but I find it plausible. The Nobel Foundation's citation of 1968 praised a narrative mastery that expresses 'the essence of the Japanese mind'. The book that best earned that phrase for readers abroad reached them by way of an American translator, through a hero who preferred a European art he had never seen.
The ending refuses the preference. A village warehouse that has been turned into a makeshift cinema catches fire. Yoko, who has been the novel's most elusive figure, falls from the balcony. Komako carries her away. Shimamura is left looking up at the Milky Way. Whether Yoko survives is a question the book declines to settle, to my reading. The reading I find most persuasive turns the story over at this point. The one event in the book that is not at a remove happens in a building made for remove. A cinema is where a village goes to watch what it has never seen. Here the cinema burns, and what is left is a woman with another woman in her arms and a man too far from either to be of use. Enright found the ending cryptic and observed that Shimamura ends as nothing while Komako, usefully or not, remains alive. Some readers take it as the moment at which the two women, and not Shimamura, become the story. I cannot prove that, but nothing in the book contradicts it, and the glass Shimamura loved at the opening has met, at last, something it cannot reflect.
When Alasdair died, the tin came to me along with the dresser, and I have not thrown it out. The cuttings have yellowed to the colour of weak tea. I looked once for the pamphlet on clearing the Engadine passes and found it where he had always kept it, folded in four, with a crease worn white at each fold by decades of winters. Nothing in it could ever have disappointed him, which was the secret of its long service. I have never ridden any of the lines in his tin either, and I notice that I do not feel the want of it. That is the charge Snow Country brings against Shimamura, and the reason I cannot dismiss the book as a story about somebody else. The snow in it falls on a town that is entirely real to the people who live there. Only the man on the train is looking at the glass.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Seolguk (설국), Kawabata Yasunari, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward G. Seidensticker), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- D. J. Enright, “The Japanese Nobel,” The New York Review of Books, 27 March 1969 (review of Edward G. Seidensticker's translations of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes).
- Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Laborers of Love in Snow Country: The Fantasy of Capitalism,” Proceedings of the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies 5 (2000).
- Nobel Prize Outreach, “Yasunari Kawabata: Facts,” Nobel Prize in Literature 1968, nobelprize.org.