She’s had relationships before yet is curiously not touched by them – one lover who wanted to marry her dies during Shimamura’s visit but Komako cannot bring herself to visit his grave. Yet when she is with him she constantly talks about the need for her to go home. She cannot be apart from him for long, climbing through his window, hiding in the closet to avoid the hotel staff to be with him. It breaks out in behaviour that changes direction every few minutes. If he is frustrating, she is even more so.īeautiful and innocent Komako is constrained by the conventions surrounding the role of a geisha but with a passionate nature that refuses to be subsumed. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls.

And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely…All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. The closest we get is in a passage towards the end of the novel: What does he really feel for Komako? We seldom get inside his head to find out the truth. He acts more like a distant observer than an ardent lover. He watches her constantly, noting her change of colouring whenever she comes to him drunk on the sake she is required to drink at parties and noting what she wears, how she sits etc. Though he is clearly enamoured with the girl he is also rather distant from her. It doesn’t seem to concern him that he has left family behind while he takes a holiday and forms a relationship with someone much younger than himself. Shimamura is a strangely detached character. He is looking for a reunion with Komako whom he met the previous year but when you see them together you know deep down this is a love affair that cannot possibly result in happiness. They meet in a remote hot spring town which men visit individually or in groups and pay for female companionship. Shimamura, who considers himself an expert on Western ballet though he has never actually seen a performance, leaves his wife and children behind in the city to travel to the mountainside town in the depths of winter. Snow Country is a short, rather bleak tale of a love affair between Shimamura, a wealthy intellectual from Tokyo and Komako, a young geisha. Enigmatic, frustrating, lyrical is how I can best describe Snow Country, a novel considered a classic of Japanese literature and one that was an influential factor in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the author Yasunari Kawabata.

Snow country by yasunari kawabata