They meet, they talk, they sleep together, they take walks in the woods. Shimamura goes to see Komako a couple times a year.
There is no high melodrama, no passionate declarations of love. “Snow Country” works with great reserve and restraint. They fall in love after a brief friendship. Despite this, however, they are still inextricably drawn to each other. Komako and Shimamura are thereby polar opposites in terms of social status. But being an onsen geisha is not at all glamorous whereas a geisha in Tokyo could receive steady patronage through performing song and dance, onsen geisha are more reliant upon sex work, and are thus looked down upon. Now that she has returned to her hometown, many signs point to her becoming a geisha again. She met a man who promised to settle her debts but then died unexpectedly. In Tokyo, she worked as a geisha to pay for the hospital bills of the man she used to love. In the onsen town, Shimamura meets Komako, who was born in the area and has recently returned from Tokyo. He is one who lives in detachment, preferring his own fantasies to the real world. In Shimamura’s mind, ballet has an “air of unreality,” and his imagination of what ballet looks like can run unfettered.
He prefers ballet because he cannot actually see it being performed he only learns about it by reading descriptions and looking at photographs. He dabbles in the arts, having studied Japanese dance briefly before turning his attention to ballet, a Western import.
The novel is told from the perspective of Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante who has a wife and children in Tokyo. It is against this backdrop-quite ironically-that the novel’s central romance plays out. Nature slumbers, and life seems to recede from view in the harsh winters. Yet with this beauty also comes a sense of desolation. The landscape is beautiful in the winter, the entire world is rendered white as everything becomes buried in snow. Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country” is set in a remote hot spring-or onsen-town in central Japan.
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