Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese writer to do so. In his acceptance speech he makes the point that it was 55 years since it last went to “an Oriental“, which is rather shocking. His Nobel lecture is about Buddhism, suicide and poetry. Snow Country was his first well-known novel, from thirty years before (published in various formats up to 1937). The Chairman of the Nobel Committee said of it:
we see a brilliant capacity to illuminate the erotic episode, an exquisite keenness of observation, a whole network of small, mysterious values, which often put the European narrative technique in the shade. Kawabata’s writing is reminiscent of Japanese painting; he is a worshipper of the fragile beauty and melancholy picture language of existence in the life of nature and in man’s destiny. If the transience of all outward action can be likened to drifting tufts of grass on the surface of the water, then it is the genuinely Japanese miniature art of haiku poetry which is reflected in Kawabata’s prose style.
It has only two chapters; so here is the second paragraph of the third section of the first chapter:
| とうとう芸者に出たのであろうかと、その裾を見てはっとしたけれども、こちらへ歩いて来るでもない、体のどこかを崩して迎えるしなを作るでもない、じっと動かぬその立ち姿から、彼は遠目にも真面目なものを受け取って、急いで行ったが、女の傍に立っても黙っていた。女も濃い白粉の顔で微笑もうとすると、かえって泣き面になったのでなにも言わずに二人は部屋の方へ歩き出した。 | He started back as he saw the long skirts – had she finally become a geisha? She did not come toward him, she did not bend in the slightest movement of recognition. From the distance he caught something intent and serious in the still form. He hurried up to her, but they said nothing even when he was beside her. She started to smile through the thick, white geisha’s powder. Instead she melted into tears, and the two of them walked off silently toward his room. |
Maybe I was just in a bad mood on the two nights I read this (I was reading it alongside Xenophon’s Ephesiaca, which is a lot more fun) but I found that this moved rather slowly for such a short book. The core plot is about a married man and his feelings for a sex worker who he meets in a mountain resort, and the actual places are described very effectively, but I found it difficult to get into the heads of the characters and might not have finished it if it had been longer. I can see also how the writer is co-opting the form of Western novel into a Japanese context (which in fairness is what the Nobel Committee wanted to celebrate). But it’s a rare miss for me in this sequence.
This was also my top unread book by a non-white writer; next on that pile is another Japanese novel, Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto. Next in my list of non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates is Wole Soyinka, and I have his Death and the King’s Horseman ready.
You can get Snow Country here.
