Snow Country

Snow Country and the Cultural Events

Culture plays a part in determining who a person is in their society. In Snow Country Kawabata shows Japanese culture through the clothing that they wore, showed elements of religion like Buddhism and Shinto, and use vivid imagery of nature and the environment to show an accurate aspect of Japanese culture. Yasunari Kawabata was born on June 11, 1899, in Osaka, Japan. He lived a sorrowful childhood. When he was a baby both his parents died from tuberculosis and he and his sister moved in with his grandparents but shortly his little sister and grandparents died, which shaped Kawabata personality and writing style as it is today. Kawabata was a wonderful student, passionate about reading which grew

Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante, travels to a hot spring tourist resort to met his lover named Komako who is a geisha, a Japanese hostess trained to entertain men with conversation, dance, and song, at the inn. While on the train, he sees this beautiful girl, nursing a sick man named Yukio through the reflection of the train’s window. He eventually found out that Yoko and Yukio knew Komako and that Yoko and Komako were rivals. Shimamura continued to come once a year. When he went up to the mountains, he hires a blind masseuse, she told him about Yukio and Komako. She said that Komako sold herself as a geisha to pay for Yukio’s medical bills and was whom she was supposedly engaged too. When Shimamura asked Komako if it was true, she told him that they were not engaged but childhood friends. The next morning, Komako walked Shimamura to the station, where Yoko suddenly appears and told Komako that Yukio was asking for him because he was about to die. But Komako did not want to see him and he died and a year later his mother, the music teacher and the person Komako stayed with, died. Days later, as the two talk, they heard a fire alert in the cocoon warehouse where people were watching a movie and the film catches on fire. As the building burned, a body falls through the flames, Komako screaming, ran to Yoko body, holding onto her as the warehouse continues to burn as the Milky Way

There are two major religions in Japan that are portrayed in Kawabata novel Snow Country, one is Shinto, Japan’s oldest religion and the other is Buddhism, a religion that came from India. First, Kawabata used the idea of cleanliness to depict the Shinto religion. Shimamura constantly heads down to the bath to washes which show how cleanliness is important to him. Also, Shimamura talked about how Komako’s existence seemed to become cleaner and purer from the knowledge of how Komako sold herself to be a geisha so that she can pay for Yukio doctors’ bills (61). The thought of Komako taking herself to help Yukio is a purity in itself. Also, he said that “the impression she gave was above all one of cleanness, not quite one of real beauty” (32). Meaning that the thought of her being clean makes her even more attractive, not just her outward appearance but her inner self that Shimamura think is clean. “Shinto shrine architecture has provided the inspiration for the clean” and the shrine has a kami, a divine being, which can be animals of Japan or mythological, or fantastic beasts from China or India. These kami can be deer, monkeys, foxes, dragons, and other animals (Ebersole). In Snow Country, the kami was the dogs. Shimamura observed a woman sitting down on a flat rock beside the moss-covered shrine dogs where the dusky green of the cedars reflect from her neck (29). The another religion that Kawabata