Snow Country by Yasunari Kabawata
Snow Country is often touted as the magnum opus of the Japanese author Yasunari Kabawata. It is a simple story of a middle-aged man who visits a hot-spring town in snow-clad Japan and has a romantic interaction with a geisha. The story progresses riding on the vivid descriptions of a snow-clad Japanese town by Kabawata, and we get to know more about the protagonist, his professional aspirations and also about the geisha's life, how she got into this profession, her romantic rivalry with another young girl and also how she unknowingly conjures up a bright future with him in her mind.
The story is narrated beautifully and evokes a sense of the idyllic charm of the surroundings and poignancy at the hopelessness of the romantic encounter, along with a despondency of the weathering away of unappreciated beauty. Not much happens in the story, but it still leaves an indelible mark on the hearts of the reader.
The story has many of the hallmarks of a haiku, which is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. The story is a series of brief encounters and short scenes which combine two contrasting or antithetical perspectives to create a sense of heart-touching beauty. So we see mentions of not mere silence but roaring silence, sad beauty of the geisha, and so on. This captures the completeness of beauty in a very touching way.
Towards the end of the novel, we see how the geisha's imaginative future is shattered when the man shifts from calling her a good girl to a good woman. This climactic scene cements the failure of their relationship, which was doomed from the beginning and shatters all her hopes of coming out of her situation.
The geisha is described as a wasted, unappreciated beauty who is stuck in a quicksand which will bring her down in her social standing. So, she is in one way similar to the hot-spring town, which is subdued in its vitality owing to the snow. Even though she catches a feeling for the man and maybe also dreams up a better life for herself where she can work with dignity, all this comes shattering to smithereens in the end.
The other geisha who is described as her romantic rival, also has a sad ending. She plans on moving to Tokyo to escape the hopelessness of her situation and maybe start life anew. But this does not come to pass, as she dies in a fire at the end.
The man also has a poignant ending. He denies the spontaneous love that arises between him and the geisha and goes back to his life of monotonous scholarly pursuits.
Even though the story ends on a sad note, the brief interaction of such lively characters in a snow-clad hot-spring town creates a heart-touching story that stays with the reader for a long time. This, is the beauty of this lovely heart-touching novel by Yasunari Kabawata.