[Snow Country] holds the potential to shed considerable light not only on the larger purposes of Kawabata's work but on the techniques of Japanese narrative fiction in general. In this regard, Snow Country is a mirror, reflecting both backwards and forwards….

[Kawabata's Nobel Prize acceptance speech] provided a selection of certain principles especially important to him, many of them related in turn to Zen Buddhism.

The first of these is asymmetry. (p. 162)

Asymmetry and a resulting suggestiveness provide the means by which one small thing can evoke a whole world. Closed structures, harmoniously arranged, merely define themselves. Kawabata is careful to point out, however, that the asymmetry is not naturally evoked but comes from a discipline created through "a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities" that have in turn been rigorously formed and refined. (p. 163)

A desire to pay homage to the nourishment provided by the past seems to put Kawabata in the role of advocate for traditional styles and roles of literature in Japanese culture. In assuming this stance, he was … self-conscious about his own distance from the past…. Kawabata's very distance from his tradition gave him a self-conscious awareness of the workings of the traditions necessary to permit him to adapt them for his own particular purposes. Indeed, what now strikes the readers of Kawabata (including those who have no knowledge of traditional Japanese aesthetics) is his ability to capture with startling freshness the psychology of his characters and the atmosphere that surrounds, and indeed helps define, that psychology. His remarkable skill certainly attests to the continuing vitality in the older traditions, but it shows as well his uncanny agility in recasting the traditional literary techniques into a modern narrative form so compelling that the results seem not only agreeable but inevitable. (pp. 164-65)

The particular place and the poetic implications of that place form one element in the delicate balance that produces the narrative style of Kawabata in Snow Country. The concept of the poetry of place may provide a useful way to open a discussion of the book itself…. Kawabata's ability to evoke a natural scene represents one of his strongest talents as a writer. Whatever the larger purposes of his descriptions, his sensibilities (like those of the great haiku writers) are invariably particular, sharp, and precise….

Above and beyond Kawabata's skill in the technique of nature description, however, rests his ability to construct his whole novel on an extended metaphor of travel…. Reduced to the level of plot [Snow Country] seems to have a number of precedents, including Sōseki's Kusamakura, Bashō's travel diaries, and even the Tosa Diary of Heian times. Like the travellers described in these earlier accounts, Shimamura too is in search of something. (pp. 167-68)

[Kawabata] often blends the character and the geography of his story together, until Shimamura finds it difficult to distinguish in himself any distinction between his attraction to Komako and his attraction to the "snow country." (p. 168)

Such blurring and blending produces the suggestiveness so important to Kawabata in setting up the larger evocative purposes of his novel, purposes that lie behind any given set of narrative particulars.

Kawabata is careful to make this blending of character and setting a source of self-conscious pleasure to Shimamura…. (pp. 169-70)

All the other characters in the book are seen through the eyes of Shimamura, and the reader's basic sense of confusion over their various relationships mirrors Shimamura's own. In particular, Komako's relationship with her friend Yoko puzzles Shimamura. Both women seem to have been in love with the same young man, Yukio, who dies of tuberculosis early in the novel. The tensions between the two women seem at times to be intense, yet Shimamura, glimpsing both women only from time to time, cannot grasp the precise nature of their feelings for each other. (p. 170)

Kawabata's own narrative structure helps create the necessary dream-like quality…. The movement of the novel is often oblique. In the opening chapter, for example, the reader is provided with the suggestion that some important events have happened before, yet the nature or meaning of the events is never clearly stated. Again, the novel has no clearly defined ending at all: the final episode presents Shimamura with a last unsettling vision of the "snow country" just as he decides to leave it, probably forever…. Kawabata manages to make the reader accept his … open aesthetic structure by changing the reader's expectations, who is slowly led to see that, in its totality, the novel makes a surprisingly unified whole.

Kawabata's unusual structuring of Snow Country has been studied by Nakamura Mitsuo, one of the leading contemporary critics of Japanese fiction, and his observations provide a most suitable means to come to terms with Kawabata's techniques. Nakamura suggests that Kawabata has constructed his novel along the lines of a nō drama. Komako, the focus of attention in the novel, functions something like the shite in nō, the character whose personality the spectator must penetrate as the drama proceeds. Shimamura is the modern equivalent of the waki, or subsidary character, often a priest travelling in search of enlightenment. (pp. 171-72)

An examination of the text of Snow Country in terms of the nō drama reveals not only … structural similarities …, but a series of consistent references to the nō. (p. 175)

Snow Country enlarges an evocation of the poetry of place to a general comment on the human condition, specifically on the sadness, and on the beauty, of human dedication. Kawabata's particular method of manifesting these larger themes comes through his constant reference to the beauty that lies in wasted effort, a beauty that ultimately justifies that effort. The references are explicit and cumulative. (p. 176)

Shimamura's fascination with the Chijimi linen woven in the "snow country" leads to a passage in which all the related images are combined. The infinite care and labor required to produce the cloth can perhaps be justified, despite the wasted effort involved, because of the love that went into its making:

The thread of the grass-linen, finer than animal hair, is difficult to work except in the humidity of the snow, it is said, and the dark, cold season is therefore ideal for weaving. The ancients used to add that the way this product of the cold has of feeling cool to the skin in the hottest weather is a play of the principles of light and darkness. This Komako too, who had so fastened herself to him, seemed at center cool, and the remarkable, concentrated warmth was for that fact all the more touching.

But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man's children suddenly floated into his mind.

Here Kawabata binds together the characters (Shimamura, Komako), the plot (Shimamura's realization that he must leave for good), the images recurrent throughout the text (the cloth, the "snow country" itself), and the thematic concern of wasted beauty, a concept that in turn evokes those characters, images, and plot. Such linking, such reinforcement, becomes impossible to unravel. The poetry of place becomes the poetry of self-realization and, as in a nō drama, the dream then comes to an end. The image of the Chijimi cloth, like the waka poem embedded in the climax of many a nō play, serves as a kernel from which all the other images can be seen to have sprouted and grown.

Kawabata's achievement in Snow Country shows the strength of the earlier traditions to which he remained so attracted; and his achievement reveals the pliancy of those traditions as well…. For Kawabata, who never imagined abandoning the best of [the traditions of earlier generations] his advocacy produced a body of work that, for all its homage to techniques and values of the past, remains in many ways the most contemporary among the work of all twentieth-century writers. His inner poetic world, like that of Lady Murasaki's, moves quickly across the spaces of time, out of its own culture and into our own, remaining both accessible and suggestive at the same time. (pp. 179-81)