This is by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

His life was imprinted with sadness. Before he turned 20, he had lost his father, mother, grandmother, sister, and grandfather. His first child died, and he and his wife had no more children. Just four years after winning the Nobel Prize, Kawabata was found dead as a result of gas poisoning. He was believed to have killed himself.

Like many Japanese novels of the period, this work originally appeared in segments, from 1935 to 1937. A complete version of the book, with amendments, was published in 1937, but Kawabata continued making changes, and the final product appeared in 1948.

I read the 2003 Spanish translation by Juan Forn (more on this later).

For once we have no strange title discrepancy. The title of the original, Yukiguni, which literally means "snow country", is exactly equivalent to the Spanish Pais de nieve.

And it is, indeed, a chilly book... It's set in Niigata, which is famous for being the snowiest region in the world. Three or four metres is nothing unusual. (We saw this area on screen in A Little Girl's Dream. Sado Island, the setting for Shiver, is right opposite, and Niigata also features prominently in An Unknown Place.)

Snow Country starts with a winter train journey towards a hot springs resort in the mountains. Everything is cold and white.

The evocative opening section not only offers a brilliant representation of the dreamlike atmosphere of a night-time railway journey, in which reflections are superimposed on the scenery outside, but also introduces us to some of our key characters. We meet Shimamura, a no-longer-young Japanese man of private means, who resides with his wife and children in Tokyo, but is travelling alone. He has memories of someone he has met before at the place he is travelling to. We also meet Yoko, whose clear, sad voice and beautiful face fascinate Shimamura, and a sick man named Yukio, who is travelling under Yoko's care.

Arriving at his accommodation, Shimamura meets the woman he remembers. He can't remember her name, and has not been in contact with her since his previous visit. But she is Komako, now a full-fledged geisha.

Of course, there's some background here, and the translator's Introduction explains that the hot springs (onsen) in the mountain region fulfilled a very specific function at the time Kawabata was writing. They weren't fancy spas, and guests didn't come for the sake of their health. Predominantly male clients came to ski or relax, and, as they rarely brought their wives, every onsen inn would have its geishas: "The mountain geisha was not exactly an outcast, but she did not have the social aura of the city geisha, who used to be a consummate artist involved in dance, music, political intrigue, even cultural patronage. The mountain geisha entertained guests in the inns, and the distance that separated her from the prostitute was rather subtle... Generally, they went from hot spring to hot spring, from inn to inn, less and less asked for as the years went by, making them a touching embodiment of waning and dilapidated beauty."


Yufuin, 2023. The nearest we've been to a hot spring in the mountains recently

After the initial meeting with Komako, we flash back to Shimamura's previous visit, in the preceding spring. Aged 19, the young woman is still not a geisha at that point, but she helps out with parties, and comes to entertain him. She lives a strange life in the midst of constant flux: "Everyone is passing through. I might still be a child, but I know very well how it works. The one who does not tell you that he likes you, and yet you know he does, that's the one you have good memories of. You don't forget him, even long after he's gone. So they say. And that's the one who sends you letters afterwards." Shimamura asks her to call a geisha for him. She refuses.

Shimamura, married with children, doesn't want to complicate his life with a woman whose position is so ambiguous, but at the same time he sees her somehow as an unreal being. Shimamura has a yen for the unreal... He studies Western ballet, for example, partly because he knows he'll never actually see a European performance, and can't bear to watch a Japanese one: "Nothing gave him more pleasure than writing about ballet on the basis of what he had read in books." Perhaps this is why, when a 17- or 18-year-old geisha answers Shimamura's invitation, he loses interest. She's too real: "She's the incarnation of the mountain geisha, from head to toe."

Komako is a curious woman. She speaks her mind, puts Shimamura right, is not in the least deferential or humble. She regularly gets drunk. And she's self-contradictory and capricious. Yet she sees life with great clarity. And when she and Shimamura first sleep together, she says: "I won't regret it. Never. I'm not that kind of woman. Even if it can't last... It's not my fault. You are to blame. The one who gave in. You are the weak one. Not me."

After that night, Shimamura goes back to Tokyo.



Now we're back with the second visit, the winter one we opened with. And finally, Shimamura finds out Komako's name... We learn that Yukio, the sick man on the train, has tuberculosis, and has come home to die. Yoko's position in the house Yukio shares with his ailing music-teacher mother remains mysterious. Later, Shimamura's masseuse tells him Komako became a geisha last summer to help with Yukio's medical bills. She says they were engaged. Shimamura, characteristically, feels that -- if that was what happened, and Yukio is now with someone else, and is going to die anyway -- Komako's was a useless effort. Wasted effort is another of his themes... But Komako denies the engagement story.

The masseuse was right, however, when she told Shimamura that Komako is a good samisen-player, even though she is largely self-taught. Again, he feels her music constitutes wasted effort in a place like this, even though the pursuit dignifies both that solitary existence and Komako herself. (This is revealing, as Shimamura's own useless effort -- as he regards mountain-climbing, for example, or his translation work -- is somehow valuable, because it brings him face to face with the unreal.)

Komako is upset when it is time for Shimamura to leave again. She accompanies him to the station, where she is told that Yukio is dying. It's Yoko who brings the message, and Shimamura is again distracted by this young woman. Komako refuses to go to Yukio. On the train home, Shimamura regrets leaving her.



So we move on to Autumn. Shimamura is back. It's egg-laying season for the moths... In fact, this section is full of insects. Dying insects, and falling leaves...

There is generally much sadness. A geisha is leaving. The cakes she leaves as a gift taste sour and musty, befitting her tragic story of bad choices and abandonment. Komako herself, now in a four-year contract as sole geisha in a modest establishment, has had her own troubles with men. As little as Shimamura seems to deserve her love, he obviously has it, and she is hurt that he didn't come to the Bird Festival in February, as he had promised. Yukio has died, and Yoko spends her days at the cemetery. And the geisha scene is changing. The new cohort don't get on with each other.

Shimamura doesn't really understand her life, and when he says he does, she tells him straight out that he's lying: "You might have tons of money, but you're not much of a person. You are incapable of understanding."

And so they carry on. Komako continues to be unpredictable, but her heart is solid, and it belongs to this man from Tokyo. He does seem to be fond of her, after his fashion, but he's a cold fish, and in any case this relationship can never go anywhere. Everyone knows that.

He hurts her terribly by telling her first that she is "a good girl", and then that she is "a good woman". I can only speculate on why this is such a terrible insult in her eyes. Does the designation "woman" imply that she is already locked into this life, has already matured while embedded in it, and therefore can envisage no other future? I'm not sure. (James Araki argues that the two phrases are better translated as "a good child" and "a delightful woman" -- the former suggesting intimacy and affection, the latter implying an association that is temporary and impersonal, or "founded rather exclusively on sensual attraction".)

Indications that there will be a parting come thick and fast now. At the end a fire breaks out in the warehouse building where a film is being shown. Yoko falls from the burning building, and Komako goes over to carry her away. It seems Yoko is dead: "Komako moved as though carrying her own sacrifice, or her punishment." Shimamura tries to move towards the two, but the men who take Yoko's body from Komako elbow him aside, pushing him out of the whirlpool of people: "When he regained his balance, he raised his head, and felt the stellar thunder of the Milky Way reverberate within him." The end.

So we close with the two women in a sort of solidarity, united by the bonds of place, vulnerability, and suffering, while Shimamura is set apart, feeling the cold music of the stars more clearly than the chaos and anguish all around him.

And it's Komako who stands out, once you've closed this book. Vibrant, resilient, burden-carrying Komako. Not the cypher-like Yoko. Not the etiolated Shimamura. Brave, noisy, tough Komako.

Indeed, Kawabata is quoted here as saying that he "used Shimamura only as an instrument to bring out the portrait of Komako". And Komako is based on an actual woman, Kiku Kodaka (1915-99). She was placed with a geisha house when she was nine (her geisha name was Matsue), and Kawabata met her in 1934, when he was 35, and she was 19. But Kiku broke free of the geisha circuit, married, and became a kimono tailor... Reportedly, "when she married, she burned her copy of Snow Country, which was filled 'with red ink marks, including comments such as "I did not say that" and curse words in the margins.'..."



*_*_*

I initially found the time shifts in Snow Country a little confusing (anyone struggling to figure them out can consult the handy summary here). And you have to be able to embrace ambivalence... The relationships among Komako, Yukio, and Yoko are never fully elucidated, and Komako's reactions are sometimes not entirely comprehensible.

But it's a mesmerizing book. It's very simple; there's little action; its emotional impact flows along under the surface, like a river under ice. Yet, steeped in sadness, melancholy, and beauty, it packs a powerful punch.

It is filmic in the vividness of its description. Which is not surprising, given that Kawabata was a co-founder, along with Riichi Yokomitsu, of the magazine Bungei Jidai, flagship of the Shinkankaku-ha, or New Sensation School. Again according to the Introduction, this movement opposed the social realism that dominated Japanese literature at the time, and propagated the ideas of the European stylistic avant-garde. But over the years Kawabata's attention shifted towards the millennial traditions of Japanese aesthetics. You can definitely appreciate the blending in Snow Country.

On the one hand, there's a pronounced cinematic quality. You can SEE those train reflections being imprinted on the passing landscape outside... And throughout the book, we come across references to windows and mirrors (for more discussion of the images in Snow Country, see here).

Likewise, splashes of red continually rear up against white or sombre backgrounds. The redness of a face against the snow in the mirror, or the redness of a face under the white powder of the geisha; red kimono linings; the red of the autumn maples; the fine, hemp-woven chijimi fabric, which is bleached until the morning sun turns it blood red; the red sparks of the final catastrophe standing out against the Milky Way... It's all very visual.

On the other hand, scholars have pointed out that the novel's "quickly-delivered expressions, suggestive images, and uncertain or undisclosed information" are reminiscent of haiku poetry. Kawaharada argues that Snow Country belongs to the Buddhist tradition of literature: "While portraying Komako sympathetically, Kawabata invites his readers, through Shimamura’s eyes, to see both her and Shimamura (and themselves) as insects caught in the illusory cycle of desires and suffering, trapped by their karma." (Yet, as we saw above, the "real" Komako definitely fought her way into a better position. Maybe her karma was exemplary.)

There's also a very skilful blending of the two elements. As Kathryn Hemmann points out, "Instead of thinking of Kawabata as the successor to some mystical Zen poetic tradition, it’s useful to understand the author as looking through the modern lens of a camera, both in his still frames and in his tracking shots. If a haiku is supposed to capture the 'thusness' of a single moment, for instance, Kawabata instead uses his descriptive passages in the way that a movie director might use an establishing shot, namely, to suggest things about his characters that can’t otherwise be established in the absence of devices like narratorial exposition."

And throughout, there's a respectful but critical evocation of Japanese motifs. There's nothing more Japanese than a samisen-playing geisha, surely, or Chijimi linen, yet both are tainted by unequal opportunity. Shimamura thinks of the contrast between snow-born cloth and the summer kimono it would create, and likes the resulting cold-hot balance. His train of thought continues: "Something similar had happened the night before, when Komako wrapped him in her body heat while radiating coldness from the heart that love for him had wounded. But surely that love would not crystallize into anything as precious as Chijimi silk." Ouch... When he visits the cloth-makers, we're told: "The craft was passed down in each family from generation to generation, and its practitioners lived diligently and died silently, so that men like Shimamura could feel that freshness against their skin during the summer months."

Hemmann notes that there is -- predictably, given the prevailing censorship -- nothing about Japan's political trajectory in the novel: "Yet... when Japan does appear by association in the novel, it is not a healthy country... Although Snow Country is unarguably an extraordinarily beautiful novel, its themes of waste and the contrast between hardship and indolence can be seen as a veiled commentary on the state of the nation during the opening years of the Pacific War."

Shimamura is certainly obnoxious in many ways. He's the archetypally aloof, self-absorbed, thin-skinned aesthete, and thoughtless, entitled male. But he is ready to help Komako (in his one-sided way), and the reader is very aware that he, too, is trapped inside something not entirely satisfying.



*_*_*

I mentioned earlier that I read the Spanish translation. And I actually started reading it while we were in Japan earlier this year (when it made more sense to read wintry stories). Quite early on, I found myself a little confused by what seemed like a disconnect, and wondered whether I was somehow missing something.

So I looked for an English translation for comparison. The only one extant seems to be that by Edward G. Seidensticker, published in 1956 (obtainable free from the Internet Archive). Comparing the Spanish and the English, I realized that the disconnect I'd spotted was indeed the place where a big chunk of text hadn't made it into the Spanish version... OK, so that's always interesting, but I decided to postpone completing the novel until I was back home, and would have more time for text comparison.

So, with our travels to Japan and to Europe completed, I belatedly returned to Snow Country (weird though it is to be reading about cold, snowy expanses when the temperature outside is more than 30 degrees, and often feels like more than 40).

The Spanish version, as I said, is by Juan Forn (1959-2021). He was a writer, journalist, editor, translator, literary critic, and Japanophile. His version was translated from English, and I know only of Seidensticker's English translation. Yet there were some curious discrepancies.

There have been, as this post indicates, at least two Spanish translations, Forn's and Cesar Duran's (1968), plus a Catalan one, by Albert Nolla, and a comparison of the three opening sections already shows Forn's tendency to truncate.

I also looked at the French version, which was translated from the Japanese by Bunkichi Fujimori and Armel Guerne. This was published in 1960, and is available for hourly loan from the Internet Archive.



Some discrepancies are easily explained. When Seidensticker speaks of Komako's mouth opening and closing like "a beautiful little circle of leeches", he might well be accurately reflecting the Japanese, but it's just gross... Forn wisely chooses to compare the opening and closing with "the smooth curvature of a fruit" (yet fruit doesn't really open and close...), while Fujimori and Guerne fudge the issue with a circumlocution: "The flower of her bud-shaped lips was sometimes pressed together, and sometimes expanded by a warm movement that had the grace of hungry animal life." Huh, I'll remember that next time I'm getting sucked dry by "hungry animal life"...

Some inconsistencies are harder to understand. The absent bit that originally caused me to wonder whether I'd missed something contains another reflection image, more of Shimamura's impressions of Yoko, the fact that all three of the persons in question get off the train, and the beginnings of the conversation about the cold... You'd think this was all important...

Forn seems particularly loose with time. For example, "Shimamura called Komako the following night," is less meaningful than "Shimamura called Komako again the night before he was to leave", as the French and English versions have it. Similarly, Forn leaves out the information that Komako's new contract is for four years, so when "four years" is mentioned later, we're left puzzled. And again, Forn has: "That night she stayed with him, and did not try to sneak out of the inn with the first light of day", whereas the English, supported by the French, is more general: "Komako no longer tried to leave before daybreak when she stayed the night."

Sometimes, too, Forn's trademark truncation leaves out important images or details. In the English and French versions, for example, we read: "The red under-kimono clinging to her skin disappeared as she looked up." But the Spanish skips this sentence (which doesn't matter from the point of view of the story, but means we have one less "red" image to work with).

At other times, however, the Spanish is easier to understand than the English. For example, Seidensticker writes: "Shimamura suddenly wanted to weep. He had been caught quite off guard, and it struck him afresh that he had said good-by to the woman and was on his way home." As there has just been a scene with a man and a woman on the train, this is ambiguous. Forn puts it this way: "Shimamura felt like crying. The scene [between the man and the woman] had caught him off guard, and made him suddenly aware that he had said goodbye to Komako, and was on his way home" (a version that is supported by the French).

Generally speaking, in fact, I found Forn's version -- a translation that uses "the best, most sober and elegant words in the dictionary" -- very readable (while Seidensticker's, conversely, often reads very awkwardly).

There has, in fact, been plenty of disagreement over the Seidensticker rendering. Hemmann remarks: "According to academic lore, Kawabata’s candidacy was largely a result of Edward Seidensticker’s translation of Snow Country. Snow Country is an aesthetically magnificent book, and Seidensticker was able to do justice to Kawabata’s subtle and poetically resonant prose with his English translation."

Araki, though, points out that Seidensticker has frequently been praised by bilingual Americans, but castigated by bilingual Japanese... Bob Myers is definitely not a fan...



But it's far from easy, as we know, to render one language and culture into another. Three examples, to close with:

Firstly, there's that famous opening... As Hemmann explains: "In the original language, when Shimamura’s train emerges from the long tunnel, he crosses a kokkyo, or a border between countries, and, as he does so, 'the bottom of the night becomes white' (yoru no soko ga shiroku natta)."

Translators have come up with a range of options for these two initial sentences.

Seidensticker: "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky."
Forn: "The train left the tunnel and entered the snow. Everything was white under the night sky."
Duran: "At the end of the long tunnel between the two regions, you entered the snow country. The horizon had paled under the darkness of the night."
Nolla (Catalan via Spanish): "Leaving the long tunnel that separated the two regions, you came to the Snow Country. The bottom of the night was white."
Fujimori and Guerne: "A long tunnel between the two regions, and suddenly they were in snow country. The horizon had whitened under the darkness of the night."

After lengthy discussion, Seidensticker sceptic Bob Myers proposes: "Once through the long tunnel under the border, it was snow country." Followed by: "Whiteness tinged the depths of the night."

My money's on Nolla...

Secondly, there's the finger... In that opening train scene, Shimamura flexes his left index finger, and has a kind of Proustian madeleine moment.

Here is Forn's version: "Only that finger seemed to preserve a vital memory of the woman he set out to rediscover. The harder he tried to summon her image, the more his memory betrayed him, and the more diffuse the woman became. He didn't even know her name. In that uncertainty, only the index finger of his left hand seemed to preserve the warm memory of that woman, and reduce the distance that separated them."

Here is Seidensticker's: "Only this hand seemed to have a vital and immediate memory of the woman he was going to see. The more he tried to call up a clear picture of her, the more his memory failed him, the farther she faded away, leaving him nothing to catch and hold. In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand, and in particular the forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch, seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar."

Here is the French version, characteristically fulsome: "It was only this hand, the caress of the fingers of this hand, that might have preserved a sensitive and vivid memory, the warm and carnal memory of the woman he was about to join. For she was slipping away from his memory, fading away as he tried to recall her, and leaving nothing behind that he could cling to, nothing he could even hold on to. In the vagueness of his whole being, it was only this left hand, with the clear and still current memory of its touch, which seemed to allow Shimamura to go back."

Araki, however, using his own translation, brings out the sexual tone of this in a much more overt way: "Only this finger still seemed moist from the touch of that woman and seemed to be drawing him back to her over the remote distance. Fascinated by the thought, he brought it up to his nose and, for a while, tried to recapture a forgotten scent."

Thirdly, and it's a good way to end, there's this little exchange between translator and author, a propos of the curious section where Komako bites viciously at her arm, as though angered by its lack of movement:

"'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.'"

Literature, thankfully, is not always explicable.