Snow Country Yasunari Kawabata Is there essential emptiness to be found in the pursuit of beauty?

Snow Country Yasunari Kawabata

• Is there essential emptiness to be found in the pursuit of beauty?

Fusing a world of opposites

• Kawabata’s lyrical prose is based on the elements of haiku:

• Seventeen syllables poems
• Seek to convey a sudden awareness of beauty by mating incongruous terms
• Characteristically fuses motion and stillness

The collision of opposites within the novel

• Man and Nature

• Reality and Illusion

• Beauty and Waste

• Lightness and Darkness

• Innocence and Loss of purity

• Warmth and Cold

• Sadness and Happiness

• Stagnation of Time and Timelessness

• Acceptance and Denial of Love

• Modernity and Antiquity

• Can you think of any others?

Important Motifs

• Wasted Effort

• Honesty

• Mirrors and dreams

• The tyranny of beauty

• Friendship and romance

• Purity (woman and girl)

• Can you think of any others?

Important Symbols

• Heat and Cold

• The Occidental Ballet and Shimamura’s involvement in it

• Mirrors and their reflections

• Death of the insects

• Chijimi

• Spatial Distance of characters

• Movement to and from the inn and mountains

• Kikuyu

• Colors

• Seasons (when Shimamura visits: Spring/Winter/Autumn)

• Architecture

• Can you think of any others?

Let’s talk about the characters

• Shimamura

• Komako

• Yoko

• Can you think of any others?