I'm going to start by making a sort of facile observation that, of all the litearture I've read, Japanese seems to be overall the most positive about nationalism and their county in general. Perhaps someone would care to disagree?
Snow Country, which is probably the best known work by Kawabata, has actually been published in two forms. The one that I read is a novel which is just shy of 200 pages, but Kawabata also published it in "palm of the hand" form, which reduced it to only a few pages. Although the palm-of-the-hand version necessarily loses all of the detail of the novel, the basic structure, movement, and sorrowful beauty is retained, which shows a remarkable control and simplicity that's quite impressive.
The novel revolves around three visits by a ballet critic, named Shimamura, to a geisha, named Komako, in a resort town in the north of Japan. In the first visit, Komako is still fairly immature, leading them to gain sort of friendship as Shimamura tries to protect her and forgives her mistakes. But by the second visit, Komako is a woman and an experienced geisha, leading Shimamura to desire her in a more sexual way than is technically premissive in the geisha-client relationship. And by the third visit, they're having an affair, although Shimamura also gets it for Yoko, who works as a maid at Shimamura's hotel. But their affair is doomed to failure; it literally almost never worked out for geishas, and by putting one of them at the center of his novel, Kawabata is sending us the signal that the ending is going to be sad. And it is, although I won't ruin it beyond that.
In some respects, this traces the development of the emotional maturity of the characters, which is also paralleled in their career development. Komako moes from being an inexperiened girl to a woman capable of supporting an angry love affair with Shimamura, just as she moves from being an unseasoned geisha into a graceful expert (although she learns the shamisen from the radio, which isn't exactly the tradition.) And when the novel ends, she's prepared to move on with her life without bitterness and without Shimamura.
Shimamura, in contrast, has no emotional development or career development; he's frozen in time, which forms the basis for the failure of the relationships in the novel, and also for its tragedy. Shimamura, as quizbowl will tell you, actually doesn't know anything about ballet, his nominal field of expertise - in fact, he's never actually seen one and experienced its beauty in person, . And he's focused on something western, which is never a good trait in a character in a Japanese novel (see: Some Prefer Nettles.) So Shimamura is really quite a failure in his career, doing nothing useful, sitting idly by and leeching off the pres without really contributing any expertise. And the equivalence between his professional development and his emotional maturity is absolute.
Neither of the two major are really complexly realized. The equivalence between emotional and professional maturity is pretty even. But there's a certain beauty in this simplicity, and one can charitably assume that to be Kawabata's goal in writing the novel. Rather than presenting a complex psychological portrait of two characters in their relationship, we get a series of three episodes which illustrate a larger story of loss and beauty between two lovers. I don't think anyone can claim that the novel is really that interesting psychologically But it is beautiful, if simple, and I think that lends credence to the frequent observation that Kawabata was really trying to write a novel-length haiku.
Those observations made, here's a brilliant haiku by Richard Wright, who's way better known for his novels than his extensive poetic writings:
In the falling snow
A laughing boy holds out his palms
Until they are white.
And as always, if you want to buy a copy of the book mentioned in this post, you can go here.
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