Snow Country

“Taken with the strangeness of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the misted-over window. A woman’s eye floated up before him.”

The disembodiment of Yoko’s eye, as it appears to Shimamura in the reflection on the train window, foreshadows Shimamura’s consistent instinct to objectify the women he is attracted to. In this scene, there is the illusion of interaction between the two characters since Shimamura perceives the eye as staring back at him. In reality, Yoko has no idea that she (or rather, her reflection) is being watched, making the exchange entirely one-sided.

“It was a distant, cold light. As it sent its small ray through the pupil of the girl’s eye, as the eye and the light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains.”

Kawabata uses chiasmus—ray, eye, eye, light—to visually mimic the process of the eye being reflected in the window. Such wordplay reinforces the uncanniness of the phenomenon, creating a version of what Shimamura is experiencing.

“Shimamura, who lived a life of idleness, found that he tended to lose his honesty with himself, and he frequently went out alone into the mountains to recover something of it.”

To himself, Shimamura frames his trips to snow country as self-interventions. In truth, he uses trips to fuel his escapist fantasies. He is only able to achieve honesty with himself in the final moments of the novel, just before disaster strikes at the warehouse. In retrospect, this statement carries heavy irony.