Snow Country

The subtractive test is hard to answer against a book this spare: there is almost no exposition to cut, and the elisions do much of the work. What Komako was to Yukio, and whether she was ever his fiancée, is never settled, and must not be. Nearly every image recurs with work to do: the mirror, the cold hand, Yoko’s voice. But the book was not composed as one thing. It came out in episodes over twelve years, and Kawabata extended it twice after he had called it finished. The autumn section restates the lovers’ impasse it has already shown; the chijimi passage could be lifted with a loss of tone rather than of meaning; and the fire, the last part written, reads as a decision made late about a book that could have kept going. Necessity is high in the parts and lower in the whole.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The charge that the book renders a mood, a cold and lovely melancholy, is partly wrong, since what it discloses can be stated. A love is given entirely by one person and received as a spectacle by the other; the onlooker prizes beauty because he will not pay for it. Shimamura’s word for Komako’s diaries, “wasted effort”, turns on him: her diaries, her shamisen practised alone against the mountains, her keeping of a household that ruins her, are effort that is beautiful because it is wasted, and he can see that only because he risks nothing. Without lecture it shows the economy of the hot spring geisha, the debts, the contracts, the season’s guests. Held a tenth below the gate because the disclosure is kept at the angle of Shimamura’s gaze: the book refuses to state what it knows, and much of its truth stays in the register of feeling.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation comes often and at height. The opening rises at once: the tunnel, the white ground of the night, the train stopping at the signal halt. In the train window Yoko’s face floats over the dark evening fields, and a light in the hills passes through her eye: one of the great images of the modern novel. The book returns to mirrors, Komako’s red cheeks in the morning glass against the snow, so that the height is a method and not an accident. Komako playing the shamisen alone, with the valley for audience, rises again; the chijimi linen bleached on the snow is a still beauty of another kind; and the close, with the Milky Way seeming to pour down into Shimamura as the warehouse burns, is cold terror and transport at once. Held below 9 because some of the middle, the inn conversations, is flat by design.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The tunnel is the threshold into another world, and the book keeps the shape of the otherworld journey: a man passes into a country of snow and women, is cared for, cannot belong, and the country closes on him in fire. Yoko is the figure of pure voice and of death, Komako of the body and its waste; the two women are almost halves of one feminine figure. Over the close hangs the Milky Way, the river of heaven, which in the Tanabata legend divides lovers. These bear weight in the last pages. Held below the gate because much of the archetypal is evoked as resonance rather than built as structure: the book never makes Shimamura’s passage a rite with consequences, and the reader supplies the myth the images invite.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Kawabata came out of the New Sensationalist school of the 1920s, with its borrowings from Western modernism. Snow Country turns from that, and from the confessional I-novel, toward a linked form with the logic of renga and haiku: images joined by association and season rather than by plot, the decisive events left off the page, a narrative that advances by its gaps. It departs from both the Western-style realist novel and the sentimental fiction of its day, and it wagered that a novel could be made almost entirely of perception and withholding, written through the war years about nothing the age thought urgent. Held a tenth below the gate because the turn is also a return to an old Japanese aesthetic, and in part a path Kawabata had prepared in his own palm-of-the-hand stories: a swerve from the modern novel back toward classical sensibility.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Put this content into a continuous realist novel and it stops knowing what it knows. The elision is the knowledge. Komako is seen only as Shimamura sees her, in reflections, through doors, as a voice down a corridor, and the form enacts the distance that is the book’s subject. The order of time opens on the second visit and recalls the first, so that the first meeting is a memory already lost when the book begins, and closes on the third. The mirror is the book’s way of knowing in miniature: Shimamura sees most clearly what is superimposed and unreal. Joined by season rather than by event, the episodes make the passage of a year the thing that is wasted. Held off the top only because the late joins, the autumn section and the ending, owe something to the book’s history rather than to its design.

Score: 8.8 / 10

More than seventy years of reading in Japan and abroad have not exhausted it, and its questions remain open: what Komako was to Yukio; what Yoko is, and whether she dies in the fire; whether Shimamura is condemned or merely shown; whether the ending is a culmination or an abandonment. Japanese criticism has read it as the summit of lyrical modernism and as the self-portrait of an aesthete’s coldness. Western readers have taken it as an emblem of “Japanese beauty”, a reading Kawabata’s Nobel lecture fed and later critics have pressed against. On a second reading the mirror images and the motifs of voice reorganise themselves. Held below 9 because the well is deep but narrow: the book returns intensities more than it returns new orders of meaning.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the Japanese novel of the twentieth century, and through translation the modern novel as the West first read it from Japan. Intrinsic force: high. It is a defining achievement of the lyrical line, the book in which modernist technique and classical aesthetics were fused into a form Japanese fiction could keep. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in Japan it is a school text and the touchstone for Kawabata’s line of fiction; Seidensticker’s English of 1956 was one of the first books by which the West read the modern Japanese novel; the Nobel Prize of 1968 named it first of the three novels it cited, with Thousand Cranes and The Old Capital; and its opening sentence is among the most famous in the language. Held a tenth below the gate because its pressure is felt as a model of tone, a sensibility confirmed, more than as a reorganisation particular later works can be shown to have built on.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on span, form and presence. Span: seventy-eight years from the definitive text of 1948, eighty-nine from the first book of 1937. Form: whole, with nothing lost; the condensed version Kawabata made near the end of his life sits beside it and does not displace it. Presence: continuous in Japan, in school reading, in editions and in two film versions, and wide in translation, with Seidensticker’s English in print since 1956 and versions in the major languages. The surface is fixed to a moment, the geisha economy of a hot spring town before the war, and has outlived it: the book is now read for what that world disclosed, not as report. Held at 9.0 and not higher because its readership abroad, though steady, is narrower than that of the great Russian or English novels, and in Japan Sōseki’s Kokoro is more universally read.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Kawabata’s Japanese as far as this reading can know it, and in agreement with the long consensus of Japanese readers that the prose is among the most admired in the modern language. The opening’s two short sentences, the second with its startling “bottom of the night”, place the reader in the world and in the book’s mode at once. The images are exact and never decorative. The dialogue is quick, oblique and full of things not said, and Komako’s speech has a life the narrative voice withholds from Shimamura. The making carries the meaning, in the placing of images and in the ellipses. Charged for the seams of serial composition: repetition in the autumn section, and the sudden acceleration of the ending, which some readers find hurried. That holds it below 9.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the book: beauty seen at a distance, by a man who will not close the distance, and dissolving as it is seen. The most distant elements obey it. The warm and furious Komako is seen through glass as surely as the remote, almost bodiless Yoko; the inn’s comedy of drunk guests and the Milky Way at the close belong to one order; and the fire is the last and largest of the book’s spectacles. The tone holds from the tunnel to the fire. Charged: the range is narrow by choice, one consciousness, one town, three seasons of one affair, and narrowness is not coherence; the coherence is real and earned within a small compass. The fire, in a book that had refused event, is the point of strain, though it reads here as the law fulfilled and not broken.

Score: 8.6 / 10

A short novel of three persons, and what it holds is integrated, not listed. One consciousness and its failure of feeling. The erotic and the economic: the geisha’s contracts and debts, the inn trade. Labour: the chijimi woven through the winter and bleached on the snow, the cocoon warehouse. The natural order of seasons and snow, which governs the town’s life and the book’s form. A faint sacred register in the Milky Way. The chijimi passage ties labour, season and beauty into the book’s single subject. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state and history are absent, though the book was written through the war; the family hardly appears beyond Komako’s dependants; and there is no society beyond the town and its visitors. The figure describes the form.

Score: 7.4 / 10