A JAPANESE AFFAIR
From The Independent archive: John Burnside’s 2006 verdict on the haunting, haiku-style classic ‘Snow Country’
Snow Country (1937) is an extraordinarily beautiful novel, possessed of the same austere, economical beauty of true haiku; it is both haunting and bleak. It tells the story of Shimamura, a moneyed dilettante on a visit to a mountain spa, and his different relationships with two women: the impetuous, irascible geisha Komako and the mysterious Yoko, whom he first encounters on the magical passage into the chill, white snow country – a passage that has all the mystery of a fairy tale yet is oddly sinister.
Coming from Tokyo, Shimamura appears a sophisticated man of the world; in truth, he is fixed, passive, a jaded creature, incapable of real feeling. On arrival, he calls for a geisha, and so encounters Komako, who finds him fascinating and offensive; soon they are conducting an oddly detached, twisted affair, in which
the spontaneous, emotional and frequently drunk girl throws away what little reputation she has on a man who neither wants nor deserves her. Meanwhile, Shimamura becomes obsessed with Yoko, though whether his fascination stems from real desire or morbidity is always in question.
Shimamura is an extraordinarily passive man: Komako has to throw herself at him to gain his attention, visiting his room in the small hours, drunk and ashamed, while Yoko remains a tragic mystery, observed from a distance and, because the sentimentalist in Shimamura prefers it, held up to his lover as an unattainable, and so more desirable, alternative.
Snow Country is a luminous, profoundly economical work, yet its extraordinary beauty is almost painful in its urgency. Like images from haiku, the view of the mountains, or of a woman’s neck, are drawn with extraordinary attention to detail; seen through Shimamura’s eyes, however, everything becomes distorted, either by his fear of engagement or by the idées fixes he brings to every encounter.
The closer he comes to Komako, the less he is able to see her: during one of their most intimate moments, he loses sight of her altogether, instead focusing on an insect that, caught in her thick makeup, is dying before his eyes. Yet whenever he draws back from her, or when he sits listening to Komako playing the samisen, he ignores the drama unfolding around him and transposes on to its characters the romantic imagery of the emotional tourist.
The two women are caught up in their own messy, vivid and horribly urgent tragedy, their fates linked both by chance and inevitability. That the book concludes in simultaneous tragedy and farce, is both a tribute to its author’s genius and a painful indictment of the modern, desensitised “superfluous man”.