Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.

Shimamura is a wealthy Japanese "dilettante"--the book's word, and an interesting one--who lives in Tokyo with his wife and children. He frequently takes trips to a certain onsen, a hot springs bathhouse, in Japan's western mountains, where snow is frequent, early, and late. There, over a number of trips, he becomes entangled with a geisha named Komako. On each visit, he finds Komako a little further advanced in her career as a geisha--when he meets her, she's not a geisha at all, only a nineteen-year-old apprentice--and a little more in love with him, having waited for him with a little more intensity. And yet his feelings toward her are largely cold; he's unable to wholly return her affections.

I'm gonna be honest: I don't quite know what a geisha is. Judging from Snow Country, the job is an interesting mixture of sensual submissiveness and erudition. Is prostitution a part of it? I'm actually not sure, but the relationship between Komako and Shimimura is certainly a sexual one. More than this, her job seems to be to provide a good party companion: she's hired out to groups of men who want someone who can look beautiful, sing a pretty song, and even share in knowledgeable conversation. Komako is good at her job and always in demand. She can converse expertly with Shimamura about dance and literature--he, on the other hand, discards his interest in Nobu to take up an interest in Western ballet, which he's never seen, and which represents, perhaps, the way he treasures his own disaffectation and detachment. Heavy drinking, too, is a part of her role as party guest: as Shimamura's visits continue, she increasingly begins to show up at his room at strange hours, dead drunk, ready to bare freely both her love for him and her resentment.

The power of Snow Country lies in the complexity of the relationship between these two, the power of the dialogue, and the intensity of the subtext, what goes unsaid. The dialogue, as good dialogue often does, hovers just on the other side of sense; what the characters say is clearly not the sum of what is in their heart. Like Shimamura, we come to pity Komako, because we know the intensity of her love for Shimamura is all for nothing. "Wasted love" is one of the book's frequent phrases, and both Shimamura and Komako describe their relationship this way. It captures the essential tragedy--Shimamura will always return home to his family; there is no future for them--but I think it also hints at a truth about the geisha system of pre-war Japan, which has commodified the relationship between men and women. The real tragedy, perhaps, is that Kamoko can either make money from her clients or love them, not both.