10.2307@27759627

Snow Countries: Joyce and Kawabata
Author(s): David Burleigh

Source: Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 24 (2009), pp. 57-65
Published by: IASIL-JAPAN
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Snow countries: Joyce and Kawabata
David Burleigh
The opening sentence of James Joyce's story 'The Dead' ('Lily, the caretaker's
daughter, was literally run off her feet') is recognisable to many an English reader, if
not quite as well known as the opening of Yasunari Kawabata's novel, Snow Country
('The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country') to readers in Japan.
Both stories transport the reader into a world of snow and darkness that forms the
backdrop for the ensuing tale. In this paper I would like to set these two poetic
fictions beside one another, to see what they might have in common, and whether
any shared characteristics might be found. I hope to discover that they are somehow
complementary, but this may turn out to be an illusion.
While both are considered modern classics, little happens in either story, which
is certainly a point in common. Both present a faintly unsatisfactory love relation that
is suffused with sadness, but this is not unusual for any relatively uneventful short
story or novella. Both concern a man who is something of a dilettante, from whose
point of view events are seen, and who seems to be vaguely tormented by, or in thrall
to, the women in the story, and yet unable to resolve this. No resolution appears to
end the story, which more or less peters out and stops, so that it is difficult to talk of a
real catharsis in either case. And then there is the snow, the most obvious factor that
they have in common. But a bit more detail is obviously required.

'The Dead' was written to complete Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners,
just over a century ago. It was written in Rome in 1907, when the author was twenty
five, though it did not appear in print for several years. Snow Country was begun in
1934, after Kawabata made a visit to a hot spring and when he was a decade older
than his Irish counterpart. Episodes from Snow Country appeared piecemeal in
literary journals, and in book form in 1937, though further episodes were added until
a final version of the text appeared in 1947.1 It seems that Kawabata was working on
yet another version, this time a short-short story, in the weeks before his death in
1972 (2007: 228-238). So there is an important difference in composition history,
between one tale in final form, which would remain unaltered, and another, which
scarcely achieved finality, but continued to be tinkered with. In both cases, though,
the words 'episode' and 'episodic' seem suitable to describe tales that occupy uncertain
ground between the short story and the novel.
The plots of the two stories, such as they are, scarcely need recounting. In 'The
Dead' Gabriel Conroy arrives with his wife Gretta at the party given annually by his
58
aunts, the Misses Morkan, on the Feast of the Epiphany. It is snowing when they
arrive, and when they leave, and during the evening Gabriel suffers humiliation at the
hands of three women: Lily the maid on his arrival, the nationalist Miss Ivors when
he dances with her, and finally his wife when they go back to an hotel and she
recounts to him the story of the dead young man who had loved her in her youth, a
memory of whom was awakened by the voice of someone singing. During the party
Gabriel looks out the window at the snow, longing to escape, and goes to sleep at the
hotel as snow falls heavily outside. In Snow Country the protagonist, Shimamura,
arrives at a mountain hot-spring resort in December, and meets again Komako, a
young woman with whom he had enjoyed a sexual dalliance some months previously,
finding that she has missed him, much more than he missed her. They resume the
same relations which are complicated by Komako, now a geisha, being more self
possessed, and the fact that Shimamura is looking over her shoulder, as it were, at
another young woman, Yoko, whom he first saw on the train. Neither relationship
develops fully, during either this visit or one that follows, and at the close Shimamura
is about to leave, and presumably return to his wife in Tokyo, when there is an
accident and one of the women is injured in a fire.
Gabriel Conroy and Shimamura, through whom we observe the happenings in
each story, have certain points in common. Neither is very passionate or bold, and
both seem more bewildered than forceful in their dealings with the women they
encounter. Gabriel is taken aback by the bitterness of Lilys response to his enquiry
about her marriage, surprised and hurt by Miss Ivorss attack on him, and misreads
Grettas mood after the party and on the way back to the hotel. Likewise Shimamura
fails to understand the histrionics of Komako, her drunken pleadings and her
accusations. An important difference is that someone with private means like
Shimamura can come and go at leisure, and has economic power over the women
who are his playthings, even if he cannot appreciate the insecurity this engenders in
them. Unlike Gabriel, he has no occupation, yet they resemble each other in having
mild, rather than compelling, literary or artistic interests. Gabriel reviews books for
pleasure, while Shimamura affects an expertise on Western ballet, something that he
has never seen. It has to be said that Gabriel, fretting about his after-dinner speech,
and wounded by his various encounters with women, is a more rounded and
developed character than the coldly detached Shimamura, whom Donald Keene
describes as merely a cipher (38), upon whom the troubled vitality of the women is
projected. Yet both men seem genuinely perplexed by the passionate feelings of others
in the story, and this serves to emphasise their own shortcomings.
There is an incidental similarity in the detached, romantic way that the
protagonist in each case observes the woman he is attracted to. After the party,
Gabriel sees his wife pause on the stairs listening nostalgically to 'The Lass of
Aughrim' being sung by Bartell d'Arcy, and thinks what a pleasant painting the scene
59
might make, without reading any further into his wife's feelings at that moment
(211). Likewise, Shimamura views the young woman on the train, who turns out to
be Yoko later, taking care of the afflicted young man Yukio, reflected in the window
next to him, and imagines her as a figure in some romantic tale from the past, in
complete ignorance of the actual circumstances (9). There is some similarity in the
two men's attitudes and way of thinking at this point, the former found quite late in
Joyce's story, while the latter occurs near the beginning of Kawabata's.
Though each is a winter's tale, the settings are somewhat different. 'The Dead'
takes place in Dublin, securely urban, while Snow Country is set at a hot-spring resort
in Niigata, in the eponymous snow country' of the title. Shimamura's sudden entry
into this other world, when the train emerges from a long tunnel that had been fairly
recently completed, jolts the reader, who then learns that Shimamura has left his
family behind in Tokyo, and is travelling for pleasure. This seems at first different
from Joyce's Dublin, and yet in some sense both represent a holiday for their
characters. Gabriel and Gretta too are separated from their usual routine, not only at
the party, but afterwards, because they have put their children in someone else's care
and are staying in a hotel. Furthermore, Shimamura may be said to have brought the
city with him, rather than left it behind, for it looms constantly in his negotiations
with Komako. The presence there of Shimamura's wife casts a shadow on their
relations, and it is the place that she would like to go with him, but cannot. In fact
the other young woman, Yoko, asks him to take her back there later in the story,
when it is time for him to leave (135-6). In each case the time of holiday must
eventually end.
There are other locations too that exert a force on the characters in one or other
tale. Most obviously in 'The Dead' there is the West of Ireland, where Gretta comes
from, and which Miss Ivors, with her nationalist agenda, sees as the real and authentic
Ireland. There is also the pull of the European continent the other way, the place
where Gabriel prefers to travel, but the continent seems a rather vague location, a
general draw like Tokyo in the other story, compared to the Aran Islands, which Miss
Ivors mentions by name (189). J.M. Synge's book about the islands was published in
1907, the same year that Joyce wrote this story, so the tough life of their inhabitants
was on the literary and imaginative map. The snow country' of Kawabata's tale was
itself remote, and it is suggested more than once that the protagonist's reason for
going there is to restore contact with more genuine people and a more authentic kind
of life. (16-17) He is both baffled and intrigued by the geisha's open expression of her
feelings: 'That straightforward manner, so replete with direct, immediate feeling, was
quite foreign to Shimamura, the idler who had inherited his money (130). This is
similar to what the Aran Islands represent to those in Joyce's story, or to some of them
at any rate.
Other coincidences, or divergences, of detail between the stories can be found in
60
the subjects of death and music. Music of course features throughout 'The Dead', the
Misses Morkan themselves being music teachers, and recitals provide the
entertainment: Mary Jane plays the piano, Aunt Julia sings, besides the music that is
needed for the dancing. There is nothing remarkable about that, in an age when
recorded music ran only to cylinders for music boxes. Similarly for the guest
Shimamura, when he summons Komako to entertain him, she does so by playing the
shamisen, albeit to an audience of one. He also notices the beautiful tones of Yoko's
voice when he hears her call out to the station-master, but again this is unremarkable.
Both young women live in the house of the music teacher from whom Komako
probably learnt to play. The notable difference is that music is a convivial activity in
Joyces Irish setting, whereas in Kawabata it is a solitary pleasure, even a rather lonely
one, but that may be seen as a difference in the writer's vision, since geisha after all
performed at parties, and Komako herself attends these, stopping by Shimamura's
room in a state of drunkenness on her way back home.
In addition to performance, the subject of music is taken up in conversation,
quite extensively over dinner at the Dublin party, opinions passing back and forth on
the quality of different singers. Komako, in the Japanese tale, talks about Kabuki, and
surprises Shimamura with her knowledge of it (19). But there is no particular sadness
in that, as there is in the song that Gretta overhears in 'The Dead'. 'The Lass of
Aughrim', unexpectedly overheard by Gretta, not only reminds her of Michael Furey,
who had used to sing it, but the words themselves suggest abandonment and death
(210). In Joyce music leads us into death, and the elegiac conclusion of the story. It is
much less central in Snow Country, though the youthful Michael Furey's death from
consumption has its counterpart in the passing of the young man called Yukio, the
son of the music teacher whom Yoko appears to be nursing at the beginning, and
who dies part way through it. Relations with the young man are a matter of
contention between the two young women. It is Yoko who cares for him devotedly,
yet it is Komako who had been betrothed to him, apparently, though the truth of this
report is never entirely made clear.2 Nevertheless, Komako refuses to go and see him
when he is dying, against the wishes of Shimamura, whom she is seeing off, and of
Yoko, who implores her to come and see him one last time. In both stories the
afflicted young man is an off-stage presence, someone whom we never meet, yet able
to exert an emotional force on what happens to the others despite his absence. This
presence-in-absence is something that the stories share, and both Yukio and Michael
Furey appear to have died of the same disease, tuberculosis.
Before moving on from all this relative detail in the stories, to the wider
presentation, and to the concluding passages in particular, I would like to pick up one
more point that they have in common. This is the brief mention or appearance of
someone of another race, which creates a kind of hole in the story, a little shaft into
somewhere else. In 'The Dead' this occurs during the dinner-table conversation,
61
when Freddie Malins suddenly introduces the Negro chieftain singing in the
pantomime at the Gaiety, to a discussion of the merits of different opera singers. It is
an awkward moment, and the others pass it off with silence and a change of subject.
Freddie argues back: 'And why couldn't he have a voice too? ... Is it because he's only
a black?' (199) There is no answer to his criticism, but the reader wonders who this
black man might be, and why he is in Dublin. A second story seems about to open
here, yet remains untold. Another person with an untold story appears in Kawabata
too. This is the White Russian woman whom Shimamura meets selling cosmetics
and cheap trinkets from inn to inn, her costume an unresolved mixture of East and
West, and evidently quite poor. To an enquiry from Shimamura about her origins she
merely echoes the question: '"Where am I from? Where am I from?'" (91) The
interest of a Western reader is piqued by this encounter, but left unsatisfied without
an answer. Yet for a moment we forget about Shimamura, and catch a glimpse of
something else.
There is much that is different in these two stories: the events of 'The Dead'
take place in a single night, while those of Snow Country stretch on for weeks and
months. In the early part of Kawabata's story the man, Shimamura, is returning to the
hot-spring for a second visit, remembering the first some months before, while in the
later part he has arrived again, for his third visit in two years. His story is an ongoing
one, unresolved even when it finishes, whereas Gabriel Conroy's evening out
concludes with a single revelation. Nevertheless there is, I would like to argue, some
resemblance in the way that the events in each case are enveloped in a world of snow,
the blank surround of either tale. It is this aspect to which we must now turn.
Perhaps the most famous sentence in 'The Dead' is one that occurs in the
beautiful closing passage: 'snow was general all over Ireland' (225). It has been pointed
out more than once that such a happening is unusual,3 and perhaps did not occur on
January 6th, 1904, when the story is supposed to have taken place. Just the same, it is
clear from ancient classics that snow is an intrinsic part of the Irish imagination, on an
island that the Romans called 'Hibernia, the Land of Winter. I note in the new
translation of The Tain by Ciaran Carson, how heavy snow holds up a journey (28).
Later we read: 'There had been a big snow that night, and all of Ireland was one white
plain' (73) .4 Whatever the meteorological improbability, it is an appealing vision, and
something similar provides the transformative, visionary quality of the close of Joyce's
book and story. There have been various interpretations for that passage.
Donald T. Torchiana explores a parallel with St. Patrick in the idea of a
westward journey in the closing sentences of Joyce's story, and seems certain that 'a
wise man from the East of Ireland has experienced an epiphany' (253). The nature of
the epiphany has puzzled commentators, but the interpretation of it by John Wilson
Foster seems convincing: 'Snow [...] is the weather not of paralysis but of vision'
(Foster 1987: 169). He explains the vision as 'an instance of rational mysticism that
62
has accepted and transcended the disorder of life' (169), through which Gabriel
comes to a larger understanding of himself, and Gretta, and their place in the world.
It is not the same kind of transcendence that the revival poets sought, but it is
transcendence all the same. Foster says: It is a transcendent realism - transcendent
because it is musical and visionary and earns itself by assimilating the elements of a
rival literature, realism because it is made possible by the infinite pain of Gabriel
Conroy's self-realization (174). Another critic, Gerald Doherty, giving attention to
the narrative process, has this to say:
After intermittent minor appearance, the snow figure takes over the text. As
the sole dissolvable trace in the story, it alone resists the seduction of narrative
form. It alone remains free, unconstrained... In its last great occlusion, it blots
out the human world about which narratives accumulate, including the one
that brought 'The Dead' into existence. (2004: 134)
Jean-Michel Rabate, in an essay called 'Silences in Dubliners, writes:
Finally, the text approaches the region where a supreme silence reigns,
returning to the original condition from which it emerges. The space of our
reading is suspended between these two blanks, which are necessary to
understand our position as subjects of a desire to read, a desire which can be
that of losing oneself in the difference of written signs. (2006: 49)
Whatever theoretical constructs are employed, most seem to agree that the
surrounding blank is a necessary part of the aesthetic of the story, and that is
something that it clearly shares with Snow Country, where the characters play out their
lives in the midst of an isolated world, or in the middle of an empty space, and then
vanish from our sight.
The style of Kawabata's story draws deeply on Japanese tradition. There is very
little plot, but instead an elliptic series of allusive scenes conveying mood and certain
changes. Besides the snow, there are many references to colour in the story,
particularly in the interplay of red and white, loosely representing purity and passion,
or vitality as against the extinction of feeling, in a manner that recalls the writings of
the Meiji-period author Izumi Kyoka (1873-1939). The method of arrangement also
draws on the practice of linked-verse composition, or haikai-no-renga, further back.
The background of whiteness has very ancient roots, and can be found in the poems
of the Manydshu, the great eighth-century anthology, as well as in the writings of the
seventeenth-century haiku poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). Significantly, Kawabata
invokes a verse by Basho in the text itself. This is the one that mentions Sado, an
island off the coast of Niigata, and a place of exile in the Middle Ages (Ueda 1991:
63
260). It is so well known that there is no need for him to quote it, though it
introduces by implication an island presence to the story like the Aran Islands in 'The
Dead'. The last phrase in the poem refers to the Milky Way, which is described by
Kawabata in an almost visionary way as Shimamura sees it on a clear winters night
(165). This is near the close of the story, and dramatic events follow, with a fire in the
village, and a body falling off a roof, which turns out to be Yoko and which Komako
catches, while Shimamura looks coldly on. It is not clear whether the girl is dead, but
at the last moment Shimamura is pushed aside by the jostling crowd: 'As he caught
his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a
roar (175). This might suggest a loss of consciousness, but is surely more than that.
What it means is hard to discern, though Roy Starrs, in the only full monograph in
English on this writer, argues quite cogently for something like an epiphany for
Shimamura too:
Shimamura's moment of 'access to the stars' is placed at the end of the story
for a definite purpose [...] Although his final solitary, monistic experience does
nothing to resolve Komako's tragic problem, it does promise a kind of
spiritual progress for Shimamura himself - along with his dawning moral
awareness - and [...] we must remember that Snow Country is his story rather
than Komako's. (1998: 139)
The scene at the end of Kawabata's novella, with the chaos around the
conflagration, is much more dramatic than the end of 'The Dead'. And yet in
another sense, the story doesn't really end at all, but stops. There is no peaceful
resolution after a catharsis on the classic Aristotelian model, there is no calm after the
storm, as there appears to be at the end of 'The Dead'. And yet it is possible to
believe, if we look at how the haiku has been deployed in Kawabata, that some sort of
epiphany has occurred. The surrounding blank into which the story vanishes once
more is not a snowfall certainly, yet we can view it in a similar fashion. A more
important clue may lie in the wording, for the expression that Edward G.
Seidensticker translates as 'with a roar' in fact means 'making a sound' {oto wo tatete),
which occurs earlier in the novel, and elsewhere in Kawabata, such as the eponymous
'sound of the mountain' in a later novel, but also carries an echo of Basho's most
famous verse, the one about the frog jumping in the pond, where the 'sound of water'
[mizu no oto) is often taken as some kind of illumination.5 It seems possible, then, at
least to consider that it might be what Kawabata intends and that there may have
been some change in Shimamura at the story's close.
These two stories, by Joyce and Kawabata, are certainly not the same, far from
it, though it can be maintained that there is some consanguinity between them,
especially in their shared approach to the use of space, meaning the blankness that
64
surrounds the action or the situation in each case. Haiku often functions like an
epigraph, setting up a resonance in the empty space around it.6 It is a Japanese
aesthetic to a large extent, though most poetry is printed with empty space around it.
The aesthetic dialogue between these two works of fiction, 'The Dead' and Snow
Country, is to some extent re-enacted in Derek Mahon's well-known poem, 'The
Snow Party', where he invokes both Basho and the snowfall that concludes 'The
Dead' (1999: 63). The dialogue occurs in Mahon's poem at some removes, but even
then is not exhausted, for he does a version of the Sado poem in a more recent
sequence called 'Basho in Kinsale' (2005: 46). Translation work has opened up new
possibilities for such allusions, and cannot fail to make us wonder retrospectively
whether there might have been any influence the other way, from Joyce to Kawabata.
It is known that Kawabata was familiar with Joyce's work, and indeed that he
was influenced in an early experimental period during the 1920s and 30s by the
stream-of-consciousness technique (Keene 2003: 33). He is said to have purchased
the English edition of Ulysses, and read it side-by-side with the Japanese translation.
Reference books on Kawabata in Japanese appear to contain almost no mentions of
Joyce, but it is important to note that the early Joyce had also been translated at the
time that he was writing Snow Country. The first offering from Dubliners appeared in
1930, under the title Shiseru hitobito, or 'The Dead', words that could have signified
much to a writer with as much experience of death and bereavement as Kawabata.
The whole collection of stories that make up Dubliners came out, from the hand of a
different Japanese translator, in 1933. Kawabata began writing Snow Country in 1934.
Ferris University
Notes
1 The 1947 version will be referred to here. Seidensticker's translation divides the text into two
parts, and may not preserve the whole with full integrity.
2 There is a snatch of conversation in the original Japanese, omitted from the translation, in which
Komako tells Shimamura that there had been an understanding of some kind between Yukio and
herself, known to his mother, and furthermore that he was the only one who came to see her off
when she went to Tokyo. (2008:118; 1996: 117)
3 Terence Brown observes: 'A very rare occurrence indeed given Ireland's generally temperate
climate.' See note 95, p. 317.
4 The hero Cu Chulainn, was born during a snowfall. See note 10, p. 215.
5 See Ueda, pp. 140-2. There is also a 'soft tapping on the window pane of the bedroom' of the
snow at the beginning of Joyce's final passage in 'The Dead'. Foster has this to say: 'I hear the
tapping as an omen of impending vision, for at the dance Gabriel, thinking of the cool snow
beyond, longingly taps the window in a gesture surely meant to echo in the story's last paragraph'.
(168)
6 Ciaran Carson deploys them as epigraphs in Belfast Confetti (1989), and his admirable version of
the verse by Basho renders the last phrase as 'snowy galaxies' rather than the usual Milky Way
(amanogawa): Wild rough seas tonight:
yawning over Sado Isle,
snowy galaxies. (104)
65
References
Carson, Ciaran (1989) Belfast Confetti, Loughcrew, Ireland: The Gallery Press.
? (2007) The Tain, trans. Ciaran Carson, London: Penguin Books.
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Nichigai Associates.
Doherty, Gerald (2004) Dubliners' Dozen: The Games Narrators Play, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press.
Foster, John Wilson (1987) Fictions of the Lrish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art, New York: Syracuse
University Press.
Gessel, Van C. (1993) Three Modern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, Kawabata, Tokyo: Kodansha
International.
Hatori Tetsuya, and Hara Yoshi (eds) (1998) Kawabata Yasunari: zensakuhin-kenkyu-jiten [Dictionary
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Izumi Kyoka (1996) fapanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye, Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Joyce, James (1933) Daburin no hitobito [Dubliners], trans. Matsunaga Sadamu, Tokyo: Kinseido.
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? (1996) Dubliners, Terence Brown (ed), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
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? (2002) The Sound of the Mountain, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker, Boston & Tokyo: Tuttle
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? (2007) Palm-ofthe-Hand Stories, trans. Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman, Tokyo & Singapore:
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? (2008) Yukiguni, Tokyo: Shinko-bunko.
Keene, Donald (2003) Five Modern fapanese Novelists, New York: Columbia University Press.
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Mahon, Derek (1999) Collected Poems, Loughcrew, Ireland: The Gallery Press.
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Rabate, Jean-Michel (2006) 'Silences in Dubliners', in Andrew Thacker (ed) Dubliners: fames foyce,
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 33-51.
Starrs, Roy (1998) Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata, Richmond, Surrey: Japan
Library.
Synge, J.M. (1979) The Aran Lslands, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Torchiana, Donald T. (1986) Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners. Boston: Allen & Unwin.
Ueda Makoto (1991) Basho and His Lnterpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

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Snow Countries: Joyce and Kawabata

Author(s): David Burleigh

they have in common. But a bit more detail is obviously required.

Jean-Michel Rabate, in an essay called 'Silences in Dubliners, writes:

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