I’ve been reading a lot of Japanese literature recently. For some reason, Tuttle Publishing editions of modern Japanese classics are unusually cheap in the bookstores of Semarang, and for only $3 a book, how can I resist reading? Hence, I’m going to be, by the end of this year, far more well-read in Japanese literature than your average American.
This doesn’t mean, however that I have really begun to understand Japanese literature. I’m not sure, frankly, that I ever will. These books clearly originate from a different literary asthetic than the one I’m used to, and, without the proper cultural background and literary education, I’m afraid that the value of nearly all these books is lost on me.
(Shusako Endo, as I mentioned earlier, is a notable exception. I think it’s because he’s Catholic: with that background, he has training in an essentially Western institution, and an essentially Western mode of thought. Moreover, his years of study in France provided him with insights into Western philosophy as well as his own native Japanese philosophy; hence, while his novels are clearly foreign, clearly East Asian, they also resonate soundly with the Western psyche. It’s a beautiful combination.)
Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968; this means, at least to me, that somebody in the West can appreciate his art. I’m glad for him. I’m afraid, however, that person is not me. While I can see the beauty of this book—and here the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker, should also be praised—it touched nothing inside me. By the end, the characters and their plight left me as cold as the snow country that provides the book’s setting.
Shimamura, the book’s protagonist, is a wealthy dilettante, an “idler who had inherited his money.” He vacations, regularly, at a hot springs resort in the mountains, or “snow country,” where, indeed, the snow can pile up to ten feet in height. While there, he meets two women, Komako, a beautiful geisha, and Yoko, her pretty maid; he falls in love with Komako—or so we are made to believe, from their habitual association; it is clear that Komako is in love with him, but Shimamura’s own feelings are never quite stated—but also suffers a strange obsession with Yoko: her pretty face, her quiet composure, and, most of all, her beautiful voice, which, “in all its high resonance...seemed to come echoing back across the snowy night.”
This last night nicely exemplifies the style of the novel. Kawabata is a master at detail, in particular the details of nature. He invents beautiful images of this strange, snowy country, and seamlessly integrates these images into the lives of his protagonists. A mountain, for him, is not just a mountain; it is an opportunity to reflect a face, betray a feeling, or paint a tiny portrait of humanity. His images are minutely detailed, lending believabiltity to the situation; for example, he writes of Shimamura’s seeing Yoko’s face reflected in the train window by moonlight, “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.” This is the essence of Kawabata’s craft, in this novel: weirdly beautiful bits of nature, along with the humans whose shadows impose themselves upon the stately, quiet mountains. When he writes that “the girl’s face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains,” he means it: everything, for him, is in the flow of the evening mountains.
Kawabata’s writing rarely missteps, in these images—though one has to wonder whether describing a woman’s lips as “like a beautiful little circle of leeches” is his fault or the translator’s—but, nonetheless, it fails to satisfy me. Maybe it’s just my brash Western insistence on details and motivations and actual story, but the novel didn’t work for me. I mean, I get it, in the sense that I can analyze the craft and see how it is supposed to work; I just don’t get it, in the sense that it rattles my bones and breaks my heart and lodges inside my brain.
The problem, I think, is the haiku. In his introduction, the translator mentions how Kawabata is greatly admired for extension of the haiku ideal, the essence of beauty distilled, briefly, and presented as a symbol of emotion, into the novel form. And, indeed, I can see how this novel functions as a sort of 175-page haiku. Kawabata uses more description of the woman’s exterior than of her interior; her face is delineated in minute, affecting detail, but her personality and motivations are hardly laid so clear and bare. (The fact that the reader doesn’t learn her name until nearly halfway through the novel is indicative of this emphasis on outward appearance rather than inner depth.) Inner turmoil and deep desires are invariably represented on the outside; we know far more about Komako’s inner state from her red cheeks and white, powdered skin than we do from any of Kawabata’s narrative passages. Almost the only explicit emotion in the book is given to the mountains, which can seem “somehow transparent, somehow lonely,” thus reflecting, along with Yoko’s face, Shimamura’s thoughts; when these thoughts are strongly hinted at, it is always through the details of nature and Shimamura’s current outward physical state: “the woman’s hair, the glass of the window, the sleeve of his kimono—everything he touched was cold in a way Shimamura had never known before.” While this depiction of emotion is, at times, quite beautiful, with the stillness and perfectly captured beauty of a haiku, it fails to satisfy me. At one point, Kawabata seems to summarize the relationship between the two main characters with an explicit presentation of emotion; he writes that “a feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence came over Shimamura at the thought that a simple misunderstanding had worked its way so deep into the woman’s being.” I can understand the feeling—I spent the book with a similar feeling of nagging, hopeless impotence—hoping, in vain, that a solid and understandable plot would materialize, with the nagging doubt it would not; fully admiring the beauty of the prose and the scenery it captures so succinctly, yet feeling impotent to really empathize with the characters; and, finally, misunderstanding everything, in the way that a Westerner not raised on haiku seems eternally doomed to.
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