Novel Response of “Snow Country”
The literature “Snow Country” by Yasunari Kawabata describes a love affair between a hot spring geisha Komako and an upper-class gentleman from Tokyo who named Shimamura. This literature presents the phenomenon of Japanese women being neglected during the Tokugawa period through a miserable life of Komako.
The young girl Komako becomes a hot spring geisha in order to pay for the medication of her former dance teacher’s son. Unlike other stereotype Japanese woman, she loves to read, to write and to dance. With such passion, her dancing and playing musical instrument skills are much better than other geishas in the snow country. Although she has had an unfortunate childhood that forced her to be sold by money, she still looks forward for a new life fulfill with love and freedom. Komako is optimistic to her life as readers see her love and attitudes towards her customer Shimamura.
Through the consistency of writing diaries, the readers are invited to see Komako’s characteristic as not easy to give up under a tough environment. Komako starts writing diaries as her geisha career commenced in Tokyo. She cannot afford to buy diaries so she just writes on plain notebook. “I must have had a very sharp pencil. The lines are all neat and close together, and every page is crammed from top to bottom.”(P40) As these diaries mean so much to her, she swears that she will burn them before she dies. We can understand that although geisha is part of the culture of Japan, even though she sacrifices herself for the family, she is actually ashamed and embarrassed for her job; therefore, she is not proud to share her diaries with others.
Apart from writing diaries, Kawabata also uses a couple passages to describe her passion on reading. Of course, Komato reads women magazines and the books in the resort. She keeps on record on all the articles, authors on record. These habits prove that she is not just a geisha, a stereotype Japanese female; instead, she is to be seen as a teenage girl with tough personality and eager to adapt new knowledge anytime.
I think that one of the most important aspects that readers notice is Komako’s love towards Shimamura. Shimamura, a marriage man visits the west coast Japan, snow country to seek for sexual companion; she understands that but still falls in love with him insanely. In her point of view, Shimamura is different from