The beans jumped from their dry pods like little drops of light.” (109)
Yoko knelt on a straw mat beside the road, flailing at beans spread out before her in the sunlight. The pale-yellow plumes were at their most graceful, and below each plume narrow leaves spread out in a delicate fountain. “ Slender autumn grasses grew along the top of an earthen wall. Music, as we shall observe, moved him also in that way. This was one activity when he was alone where Shimamura could emotionally lose himself in the beauty of nature. He thought he would never tire of looking at the autumn flowers that spread a blanket of silver up the side of the mountain.” (90) The river seemed to flow from the tips of the cedar branches.
“In front of the cedar grove opposite, dragonflies were bobbing about in countless swarms, like dandelion floss in the wind.
In many of these passages Shimamura is walking through a landscape of fields, forests and mountains, often covered by feet of snow in winter. Little icicles glistened daintily along the eaves.” (49) “ Children of the village were skiing in the fields.Īs he started into the part of the village that fronted on the highway, he heard a sound as of quiet rain. The author employs short sentences, even fragments, sometimes in short paragraphs to simulate brush strokes the lack of chapters suggests an unrolling of the scroll itself. Needless to say, much poetic imagery arises. Also, whatever the characters do is emphasized by the use of aspects from Nature. Komako the geisha cannot control her honest feelings, while Shimamura-despite his wife and children in Tokyo-cannot frankly face his deep feelings for her.Ī unique approach by Kawabata in telling this tale is structuring it like a scroll painting. It is a story about a passionate affair between a wealthy young man and a geisha in training set in northern Japan. Snow Country was written by Yasunari Kawabata in 1934 and translated into English in 1957.
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