Sunday, 22 March 2015

Snow Country


“Snow Country”

 

Recently, it has been snowing a lot. When I see that the snow lies thick on the ground, I remember the beginning of a novel, "Snow Country" by Yasunari Kawabata. Kawabata opens the novel with "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky."

Kawabata is one of my most favorite novelists, a Novel Prize winner. He dedicated his life for writing novels related with a losing beauty in modern Japanese society. In my opinion, the train at the beginning of "Snow Country" symbolizes a modern culture. The novel is full of recollections about love affairs of a dilettante from Tokyo, the Japanese capital. In the train, the dilettante remembers his sense of touch with a lover, while watching indirectly, another female's profile reflecting on the window. His lover is a geisha, the Japanese singing and dancing girl. Because we have to pay much money to see an authentic geisha, I have seen a geisha only once when I went to Kyoto with my supervisor.

I don't know precisely about novelists who describes a losing beauty of America, but I assume that Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway wrote some stories related with the losing beauty. In the U.S.A., women look so strong and independent, expressing their opinions more clearly. I guess that women in American novels may be also quite different from Japanese ones.

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