Snow Country by Yasanuri Kawabata was first published in 1956. The Penguin Modern Classic which I read was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. It’s a short read at just 121 pages.
Shimamura is a married man and has children, he’s a wealthy man, he inherited his money and is in the habit of leaving the city and travelling to the west coast mountains of Japan, where winter arrives early. He’s travelling there by train and he recognises Yoko by her reflection on his window. She’s a part time geisha and it transpires that she had chosen that profession as her fiance is seriously ill, and she needs to pay for his medical care. The young man is travelling with her and Yoko is tending to him wrapping him up against the cold, he looks seriously ill.
It’s another geisha that Shimamura has come to see though. He believes he’s in love with Komako, she’s very quiet and demure and really not at all the sort of woman who you would expect to become a geisha, hired out every day to entertain strange men at parties – and more. I imagine that a Japanese reader would get much more out of the book than I did, although the translation seems faultless with no clunky bits. There are lots of mentions of moths and apparently they signify the non permanence and transient nature of life – according to Google! I suppose that is what the book is about. There are some lovely descriptions in it, which I always enjoy in any book.
Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, this was one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Committee.
It’s been decades since I read Seidensticker’s translation of Snow Country, and even longer since I read the original. Apart from the famous opening line, the rest of the story is a blank. Thanks for refreshing my memory.
Kawabata’s Nobel Prize for Literature was greeted with many raised eyebrows. Outside Japan, there was a feeling that the choice of a Japanese writer was long overdue. Inside Japan, the generally pleased reaction was tempered with a suspicion that the committee had made a “safe” choice.
Janusz,
That’s interesting, apart from this one I’ve only read more modern Japanese literature. I’m not really sure that it’s for me as I feel that I’m probably missing too much that would be obvious to Japanese people, but it is good for me to branch out and try something new.
I think that many Japanese would experience the same difficulty as you did reading Kawabata and other writers of that era. Times have changed and so has the cultural context of books written decades ago. I suspect that younger readers would prefer Harry Potter in translation to Kawabata in Japanese.
Janusz,
I think you are correct about them reading Harry Potter. Modern Japanese culture has become very popular here, all those comics and anime and computer game linked collectables. A couple of the younger members of our family are keen on things like that, but they also enjoyed visiting the cherry blossom time and shrines.
I found a used copy of Snow Country and decided to give it another try.
If anything, my negative reaction was more pronounced. I made it as far as Shimamura’s encounter with Komako. The scene in the train, when he is observing Yoko through her reflection in the window, is striking, but wouldn’t be possible in real life. The angles are wrong.
The copy I bought was the revised edition of 2006. Something of a surprise. Each page is sprinkled with asterisks linking to endnotes that explain things the annotator felt needed to be explained to a modern reader.
Also added to this edition are a couple of critiques by Japanese authors, and a timeline of Kawabata’s life and work.
One other thing I noticed in the few pages that I read was that Seidensticker made some odd translation choices. When Shimamura gets off the train and chats with the man from the inn about the weather, the man notes that “Last year the temperature fell to -25 degrees.” Seidensticker translates this as “Last year it went down to zero”, presumably meaning zero fahrenheit.
Janusz,
I felt exactly the same as you about the reflections, but didn’t mention it as I sometimes think that I might be a bit too nit-picking for many people! I remember thinking too that if he could see Yoko’s face reflected then she must be looking at him. I was very annoyed recently when I read a book which had been scribbled all over by someone who seemed to think that any subsequent reader must be in need of being lectured to, instead of being allowed to come to their own conclusions.