A Bleak Landscape Painted With Rich Language

So, I just finished Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1968. This is a beautifully crafted story with amazingly descriptive passages about the mountainous landscape of a small town in Western Japan, the depths of feeling in the tiniest interactions between lovers and in a sense the way the landscape shapes the nature of some of those interactions. I wanted to read this book because I was interested in branching out from what I felt was a rather male, eurocentric literary perspective. Though I do not know how much I have learned of the Japanese culture through reading this book, I did feel in touch with a perspective and a world that I had never experienced before. It was refreshing to feel connected to something distinctly different from what I know or expect. As time goes on, I hope to read more Asian, African, Middle Eastern and South American authors in order to experience similar awakenings within myself and explore the world through the eyes of its storytellers. Also, I hope to read some female authors so I can finally feel like the female characters I adore so much are not simply caracitures created by men with similar feelings about what women should be rather than what they actually are.

In the story, the lovers care for each other in a way that is both passionate and yet realistic. Their interactions are short-lived, known by both to be temporary and always occur in the isolated setting of this small mountain town. However, there is a depth to their love I feel that both will carry for the rest of their lives as part of who they are. If you have read the story you know the complications of their interactions as well as the tragedy that occurs at their final encounter. However, this story gave me a sense of the beautiful ambiguity and the intense personal nature of love in any form. Was this love affair right? Was it necessary? In the end, I could not answer those questions, except to say that I felt it would have been intensely important to both persons involved and yet the world around them would neither mourn nor celebrate their parting.

Beyond the captivating descriptions of human behavior and interaction, the scenes laid out in this book were painted with incredible detail though in rather few words. Just as a taste for the richness of language I have chosen to quote a passage I particularly identified with after spending many hours as a kid on my back looking up at the stars in the clear, dark skies of Oklahoma. "The Milky Way. Shimamura too looked up, and he felt himself floating into the Milky Way. Its radiance was so near that it seemed to take him up into it. Was this the bright vastness the poet Basho saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea? The Milky Way came down just over there, to wrap the night earth in its naked embrace. There was a terrible voluptuousness about it. Shimamura fancied that his own small shadow was being cast up against it from earth. Each individual star stood apart from the rest, and even the particles of silver dust in the luminous clouds could be picked out, so clear was the night. The limitless depth of the Milky Way pulled his gaze up into it."

From here, it is on to my great white whale. No, not Moby Dick, but War and Peace. I have started this book many times in college but always wound up overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters I had forgotten if I put it down for any period of time longer than a couple days. If I finish it, then I can safely put Russian epics behind me as it is the last of the list for me, which includes The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov. I have loved each of these books for many and varied reasons, but I will also be glad to have the experiences of reading them behind me as opposed to looming over me like some long ago issued challenge I have yet to face.