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studenison 's review for:
Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata
This was another intriguing read from Kawabata, where little action takes place, but the almost motivation-free characters manage to drag the reader through a hypnotic, tortuous emotional experience. As with A Thousand Cranes, there's a weird sense of inevitability about the slowly progressing drama, as if the world itself - the eponymous mountains of the snow country - had somehow decreed that things were destined to unfold in such a way, rather than the protagonists having much impact on the course of events.
Certainly, there's a lot of attention paid to nature, the changing seasons, and the frailty of humanity in the face of such overbearing conditions (the main streets of the towns are treacherous in all weather, it seems, and impassable in the winter). However, what struck me is the way in which such a world, or such a style of writing, seems to strip all agency away from the humans, who merely respond half-heartedly or fatalistically to the environment they find themselves in - or perhaps more accurately, their efforts become predictable, repetitive, and unable to make any change in the world.
By removing the centrality of character motivation, then, Kawabata manages to set us adrift on a dream-like sea of intensely emotional thought, reflection, and feeling, which often are set in violent opposition to the mundane occurrences - going to the bath, watching a moth die, looking out at the first snow, stoking a tiny brazier. These little details, rendered with minute precision, give rise to extreme passions within the mind of Shimamura, the narrator, as well as in the mind of Komako, the youthful but 'wasted' geisha. The feeling of slowness, and loss, and inevitability, permeate the book, making it feel like an elegy for unlived lives, which we're all doomed to, in one way or another.
Certainly, there's a lot of attention paid to nature, the changing seasons, and the frailty of humanity in the face of such overbearing conditions (the main streets of the towns are treacherous in all weather, it seems, and impassable in the winter). However, what struck me is the way in which such a world, or such a style of writing, seems to strip all agency away from the humans, who merely respond half-heartedly or fatalistically to the environment they find themselves in - or perhaps more accurately, their efforts become predictable, repetitive, and unable to make any change in the world.
By removing the centrality of character motivation, then, Kawabata manages to set us adrift on a dream-like sea of intensely emotional thought, reflection, and feeling, which often are set in violent opposition to the mundane occurrences - going to the bath, watching a moth die, looking out at the first snow, stoking a tiny brazier. These little details, rendered with minute precision, give rise to extreme passions within the mind of Shimamura, the narrator, as well as in the mind of Komako, the youthful but 'wasted' geisha. The feeling of slowness, and loss, and inevitability, permeate the book, making it feel like an elegy for unlived lives, which we're all doomed to, in one way or another.