Characters Discussed

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Shimamura

Shimamura, an idle man from Tokyo, perhaps in early middle age, who makes a series of visits to a village in Japan’s “snow country.” There, he takes advantage of the hot springs and breathtaking scenery. He also strikes up an ambiguously spiritual and sensual relationship with Komako, a young apprentice geisha. Married with children, Shimamura is unable to make a lifetime commitment to Komako. More to the point, he is unable to invest himself emotionally in their affair, such as it is, or, it seems, in any aspect of his life. An amateur writer on classical Western dance, which he experiences only through books, Shimamura notes the “wasted effort” of Komako’s life but seems unaware of his own emptiness until the novel’s final scene.

Komako

Komako, a young geisha with whom Shimamura has a relationship stretching over several years. Komako begins the novel as something less than a full geisha, though in ways she seems older than her years. By the novel’s end, the example of another geisha has been used to suggest that Komako will age quickly in her role as a professional entertainer of men. In addition, Komako’s personality undergoes change. She becomes cynical and acutely sensitive. Komako’s life has been sad. She is forced by financial necessity to give up her interest in dance and work as a geisha. Aside from Shimamura, she has no lover for whom she feels deeply. In addition, a man to whom she may have been engaged becomes ill and dies young. These difficulties never kill Komako’s spirit. She faithfully keeps her diary and hones her musical skills. She also has a tendency to drink too much sake and is often confused in her feelings, particularly regarding Shimamura.

Yukio

Yukio, the son of Komako’s music teacher, rumored to have been Komako’s fiancé (a rumor she vehemently denies). Yukio returns to the village to die. As he is about to expire, he calls for Komako to be at his side. Komako is seeing Shimamura off at the train station and refuses to return when Yukio’s request is brought to her, even though Shimamura urges her to be at the dying man’s side. Yukio dies before Komako’s return.

Yoko

Yoko, Yukio’s nurse and Komako’s friend. Yoko is much younger and more innocent than Komako. She remains devoted to Yukio until his death. Afterward, she spends considerable time mourning at his grave. Shimamura is captivated by Yoko’s voice and her apparent purity. Yoko is considering a trip to Tokyo so that she might be trained as a geisha. Komako refuses to answer Shimamura’s questions about Yoko, and relations between the two women become strained after Yukio’s death. In the final scene, Yoko dies in a fire. Komako rushes forward to carry her lifeless body from the ruins. This display of naked passion brings Shimamura face to face with his own emptiness.

The Characters

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The ending of Kawabata’s Snow Country confirms Shimamura’s judgment of the situation and makes clear the fact that Komako and Yoko are more than rivals for the attention of Yukio. Shimamura has lingered in the resort, and the first snow of the season falls. It is cold, although not as bitterly so as during his December visit the previous year. Toward the end of day, he meets Komako and goes for a walk, so they are together when the alarm signals a fire at a silk-cocoon warehouse used as a film theater. As the two rush to the scene, Komako speaks frankly about their relationship. “I’m...

(This entire section contains 650 words.)

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afraid to leave you,” she says. “But please go away. I won’t forget that you made me cry.” She adds, “If you leave, I’ll live an honest life.” When Komako forces herself past the firemen and into the burning building to seize the body of Yoko, unconscious from smoke inhalation, the juxtaposition of the two women, their essential identity as victims, causes Shimamura to recognize the anguish in his long relationship with Komako. He tries to go to the two women but loses his footing and falls; “his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.”

The attainment of self-awareness implied by this image develops slowly in Shimamura’s consciousness, for he has not wanted to recognize the essential hollowness of his own approach to life. Part of his initial attraction to Komako was to the fact that she is interested in the books and plays that her provincial life makes unattainable. Shimamura himself takes pleasure in that which he cannot attain. Initially a student of traditional forms of Japanese dance, he shifts his interest to the Western ballet and its performers precisely because the imaginative pleasure he takes in them cannot be affected by the reality of actual performances. “Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world.... He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy.” Shimamura’s interest in Komako and then in Yoko also reveals this reluctance to accept reality and the desire to pursue an image of beauty from another world. Initially, he is annoyed by the reality of Komako’s life. He finds the facts linking her to Yukio and Yoko a barrier to seeing her as a lovely object, and he finds her own emotional attachment to him equally destructive of the fantasy he has about her.

Kawabata brings Shimamura face-to-face with this tendency to romanticize by causing him, just before the fire in the cocoon warehouse, to visit the outlying villages in which a kind of cloth called chijimi was once manufactured. The fabric is a kind of linen, particularly expensive because of the conditions under which it was made. “The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the snow, and bleached in the snow.” Shimamura is a collector of this linen, a folk product no longer made, and has several summer kimono of the old cloth. He subscribes to the superstition that the fabric’s coolness in summer results from its manufacture in snowy weather. Having visited the villages in which the cloth was made, he recognizes that production of chijimi depended upon exploitation of the young women considered most skillful as weavers. Yoko, he recalls, is from just this sort of village, and in an earlier time she might have been one of the exploited workers. The economic constraints of the present, therefore, are hardly different from those of the past. The reasons that Yoko and Komako must sell themselves to men visiting the hot-spring area are hardly different from those compelling the girls of a hundred years before to prostitute themselves to the production of linen.

Bibliography

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Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, 1984.

Lippit, Noriko Mizuta. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1980.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.

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