"How to Survive a Snow Country" by Yoojin Na
"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky."
Thus begins Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country. The title refers to the coastal region of Japan's main island that lies west of the Japanese Alps. There, snow engulfs everything—the streets, the roofs, and even the wilderness—from December to May.
Such a squall may leave everything looking immaculate and sparkling, yet it has the same effect as a widespread communicable disease. Both pandemic and blizzard make leaving home perilous and movement difficult, both inspire the toilet-paper-hoarding type of panic, both create a state of oblivion and suspended animation—a lot of helpless looking out of the window.
In a sense, the snow is a symbol of disease in Kawabata's acclaimed novel. But the disease that Kawabata explores is not a literal one such as Covid-19. Rather, it is a metaphorical illness of willful indifference and impassivity that afflicts its protagonist.
The novel centers around Shimamura, a man of leisure and a self-appointed critic of Western dance. For him, living is synonymous with inertness. Though he studies and writes criticism about the ballet, he refuses to see a performance in person. He prefers the recreations in his mind over being moved by something entirely outside of himself. Perhaps such inclination also explains his penchant for doomed romances.
During his time in the snow country, he develops an intense relationship with a hot-spring geisha Komako. In the introduction to the novel, the renowned Japanese-English translator Edward G. Seidensticker describes Komako's life with the following words:
If the hot-spring geisha is not a social outcast, she is perilously near being one . . . The hot spring geisha must go on entertaining weekend guests, and the pretense that she is an artist and not a prostitute is often a thin one indeed . . . the possibility that she will drift from one hot spring to another, more unwanted with each change, makes her a particularly poignant symbol of wasted, decaying beauty.
Yet Kamoko does not let her circumstances define her. Though she knows her drunken guests would not know the difference between a dilettante and a virtuoso, she teaches herself the samisen by sight and ear. As much as such insistence initially vexes Shimamura, he cannot help being moved.
A chill swept over Shimamura. The goose flesh seemed to rise even to his cheeks. The first notes opened a transparent emptiness deep in his entrails, and in the emptiness the sound of the samisen reverberated. He was startled—or, better, he fell back as under a well-aimed blow. Taken with a feeling almost of reverence, washed by waves of remorse, defenseless, quite deprived of strength—there as nothing for him to do but give himself up to the current, to the pleasure of being swept off whenever Komako would take him.
The immensity of Kamoko's earnestness and talent shakes the core of Shimamura’s apathy. And in the face of such a challenge, Shimamura immediately reassumes the role of the critic. He tries to attribute the poignancy of her music to the love she bears for him and to the crisp air of the wilderness that surrounds them. Yet, as much as he resists, he cannot un-see the truth:
Her very loneliness beat down sorrow and fostered a wild strength of will. There was no doubt that it had been a great victory of the will . . . for her to learn complicated airs from only a score, and presently go through them from memory. To Shimamura it was wasted effort, this way of living.
Not much happens in the novel. The unlikely pair drink together, talk, and bicker. They fall in love, knowing full well that it cannot go anywhere. Shimamura is a married man, after all. So the central conflict has nothing to do with the outcome of their dalliance but with the psychological struggle between these two characters: Is it worthwhile to create beauty and meaning even if they will only spoil into the void? If not, is it better to willfully deny that they exist?
#
At the onset of the pandemic, I was determined to make the most of my circumstances. If I felt helpless at work where many of my patients struggled for their lives only to face certain death, I went home and wrote. If men betrayed or disappointed me, I went home and wrote. If the stillness of the hours became stifling, I went out to my fire escape and wrote.
In April, I broke new personal ground in writing about my experiences as a doctor, a topic that had made me uncomfortable in the past. Afterward, I felt freer to lay myself out in the open. My quirky hobbies, romantic foibles, childhood trauma, and physical insecurities were no longer off-limits once they seemed trivial compared to everything else that was happening. Being vulnerable even in such small ways helped me connect to the world at large. Whenever a friend or a stranger reached out to me after reading something I wrote, I felt like I had fulfilled my purpose as a writer—to make someone feel less alone.
But now, I can no longer emulate Kamoko's "a wild strength of will." Rather, I've become my own Shimamura. I make the same motions: I go to work at the ER. I send out queries for my newly revised memoir. I, at least, attempt to write and read every day yet an invisible film of nihilism shrouds all my endeavors, and my head swirls with rhetorical questions: When will the pandemic end? What is the point of anything when people are dying? Will things ever go back to the way they were?
For months, I shuffled between a state of frenzy and fatigue until something in me gave. I could no longer push through the present from the vantage of the near future—a hope that things will inevitably have to get better in a month or three. The only thing I could do was look even farther ahead and buy myself more time in the increments of years to weather out the blizzard.
#
A few weeks ago, I dreamt that I was biking over the Manhattan Bridge. In the dream, I felt as though I would lift off at any moment. When I awoke, I remembered where I was—in a procedural suite of a fertility clinic uptown. It wasn't the bike that made me feel like I could fly; it was the Propofol.
The nurse in the recovery room reassured me: Everything had gone swimmingly. With the eggs already in the bank from my cycle in October, I now had enough for a fair chance at a child some time down the line. Yet what I felt afterward was far from relief.
So much still would have to go just right for my eggs to someday become a person. I would have to meet a sane adult human male stable enough to co-parent with. I would need to figure out my finances and fit all the straggling pieces of my dreams into a palpable timeline. At this particular moment in my life, in the thick of the pandemic, such a future seems unlikely.
On nights that I can't sleep, I feel sorry for my eggs. I worry that they're suffering in their own snow country of liquid nitrogen. I know such concerns are beyond ridiculous. After all, my eggs are not tiny, microscopic people. They aren't even embryos. They are literally single cells. Yet when I imagine their perfect spheres of pink translucence—potentials for life suspended in time—I can’t help feeling protective.
What will become of them? Will they remain perpetually frozen? Or will they be mercilessly discarded once I die and stop paying the yearly storage fee?
My inner Shimamura chides: Another wasted beauty. Another wasted effort.
#
Kawabata based his portrayal of Komako on a geisha named Matsuei. He met her while he was holed up in Yuzawa, the heart of the snow-country region, to work on his writing.
I scoured the internet for more information about Matsuei, but all I found was an image of her as a young woman. In the sepia photo, she is dressed in a cherry-blossom-print kimono. Her face is painted white but not starkly so. At one glance, she is a beauty—thick brows, feline eyes, sumptuous lips set in a heart-shaped face, but she has none of the city maiko's glitz. She stares boldly at the photographer with a stoic expression as though she knows she will be immortalized.
In studying her portrait, I realize it matters not whether she lived happily or if she died a lonely spinster. Whatever followed, her wild strength of will had already won.
#
The last twenty pages of the book is where the most action occurs.
After realizing that he gives nothing back to Kamoko in their relationship, Shimamura takes a train on a ridiculous whim to see how Chijimi linens are made. He visits one desolate town after another until he tires and returns. On the ride back to the inn, he runs into Kamoko who gets in the cab to confront him. Much like the trajectory of their doomed love, the cab goes the furthest it can up a mountain until it can no longer. They talk in earnest, trying to reconcile their inevitable demise, when a fire erupts behind them.
When they return to the inn, the porter gives them the news: People had gathered after-hours at a silkworm factory to watch a movie when the projector caught fire. Kamoko, being who she is, immediately runs towards danger. Shimamura, being who he is, hesitates and stands idly until her action compels him to move.
She seemed to have her long skirts in her hands, and as her arms waved the skirts rose and fell a little. He could feel the red [of her skirt] over the starlit snow. He ran after her as fast as he could.
Even then, he is not running towards the fire. He doesn't care about the anonymous others. He is running towards a woman he loves, a woman whose agency he can neither fully possess nor understand. He is running merely not to lose sight of her.
They arrive on the scene just in time to witness Yoko, an innocent girl, fall from the balcony. Komako shrieks in agony, springs to Yoko's lifeless body, and tries to carry her away from the flying chars.
Finally, Shimamura decides to act. He moves towards them to help Kamoko when a crowd of men with the same intent push him aside, causing him to fall. The novel ends mid-descent with this epic sentence: "As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar."
I had not understood this ending the first time I read Snow Country. I don't know if I will ever comprehend it wholly, yet I've become familiar with the feeling. All the light and pall in the night sky pierce through me whenever my mind drifts to all the lives lost and a few that are patiently waiting to be born.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
