The NH Humanities Council concludes its year of exploration of Asian culture and literature with the Japanese novel Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, Kawabata's fiction challenges and rewards western readers with a literary sensibility that is deeply Japanese.
Humanities reporter Kevin Gardner files this report.
Readers who enter Kawabata?s Snow Country must not expect to encounter the familiar western novelistic dependencies on action, plot, and clearly articulated outcomes. Instead, they will find something subtler and more elusive, a novel of implication and of sensual awareness, one that, in literary scholar and discussion leader Emily Archer?s words, uses ?images as a narrative structure.?
Archer: (1:40) I think it demands certainly openness to a different kind of tale, to a different kind of story, an openness to perception more than action. The best way to get immersed in a Japanese novel such as Kawabata?s is to become as acquainted as possible with Japanese poetry.
Gardner: Archer points out that Kawabata?s writing plays on the same kinds of correspondences one finds in Japanese haiku, a seventeen-syllable traditional form in which artful images of the natural world are juxtaposed against fleeting comments that reveal something about the speaker?s state of mind.
Archer: (3:13) It?s more a connection between something in nature, and one?s human feeling. So any meaning is alive in the connection between nature and feeling, and that?s what Japanese literature is replete with.
Gardner: None of this is to say that Snow Country is a story without narrative ? in fact, it offers a compelling tale of doomed love and emotional inertia, set against the wintry loveliness of the hot-springs resorts in Japan?s western mountains. Snow Country tells the story of Shimamura, a wealthy, indolent dilettante, and Komako, an aging geisha whose love and loyalty to him persist without reciprocation. Their affair is more than just an occasion for Kawabata to reflect on human frailty, indecision, and regret, however. Emily Archer agrees that the historical context of Snow Country?s creation gives the novel emblematic poignancy beyond its storyline and even its poetry.
Archer: (8:25) Oh absolutely. In fact, there?s a phrase that occurs in Snow Country over and over again: the protagonist Shimamura talks about wasted effort, that phrase wasted effort occurs as he is remembering the sadness of his geisha?s life, and his own life, and when he can?t grasp the humanity that is offered him, he resorts to calling whatever is before him a wasted effort. And I think that?s a reflection of what Kawabata was mourning.
Gardner: Snow Country was written between 1934 and 1947, a period that witnessed both Japan?s military hegemony in Asia and the Pacific and its crushing defeat at the end of World War II. Kawabata?s novel can be read for its intrinsic literary merits, and as an example of the lyrical or ?neo-sensualist? school of 20th century Japanese writing, but it also stands as a kind of lament for his country?s fate at a particular moment in history. Emily Archer:
Archer: (6:40) Let?s remove him from that ?school? title for a moment: and just think of him as being, his passion as a man of letters, to restore the sense of Japanese beauty, and poignancy, and the essential spirit of the Japanese people that had been lost through industrialization and becoming a world superpower and through this military action and the oppression that was so present during the thirties and the forties during the war. (7:45) His immersion in classical Japanese art is certainly present in this book and in everything he wrote, and I think it?s that persistence of the Japanese spirit that makes this novel not so vulnerable to world events.
Gardner: Public discussions of Yasunari Kawabata?s Snow Country will take place tonight, at 7pm, at the Newington Barnes and Noble bookstore, and at the Littleton Public Library. Tomorrow night, additional discusssions will be held at Gorham?s Wonderland Bookstore, and at the Manchester Barnes and Noble, also at 7 pm.
For NHPR, I'm Kevin Gardner.
