"Snow Country" has been read by 40,000 people on Douban, with a rating of 8, and people who like it like it are very much, and people who don't like it are also quite resistant. As for whether this book is enough to win the Nobel Prize, whether Yasunari Kawabata is eligible for the Nobel Prize is different from whether readers can read the book and whether they like it or not. The Nobel Prize has many obvious criteria for judging, and there are also some political factors that influence it. So we focus on the question of what Snow Country is all about.
Through the long tunnel of the county boundary, there is the snow country. The night sky is white.
The snow country in the movie
1. Is this the story of three people?
"Snow Country" tells a story born of desire and eventually returned to nothingness. Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country" shows the "beauty of nothingness", to understand the character setting, emotional relationship and final ending from the perspective of nothingness.
The main characters in the book are Shimamura, a researcher of dance art, Komako, a geisha, and Yezi, a maiden who meets in Pingshui, and Komako's fiancé. If the bright line is about the love entanglement of three people, then the dark line is just telling the story of the colt. The setting of Komako's fiancé, who is terminally ill, plays a very crucial role in the novel, and the patient's inability to take care of himself determines that both Komako and Yezi have the responsibility to take care of him, and the only thing this man can bring to the two is despair, doubt, and confusion. To this end, Komako and Leaf react in two very different ways, Komako's approach is to engage in geisha to make money, and Leaf's practice is faithful to accompany and wait. It can be seen that the protagonist of the story is not so much Shimamura as Komako.
Komako and Shimamura
The four emotional lines outlined from this are Shimamura's feelings for her lover Komako, Komako's feelings for her fiancé, Leaf's feelings for her lover, that is, Komako's fiancé, and Komako's feelings for Yezi. The first three feelings are well understood, only Komako's feelings for Yezi are deeply hidden, and Komako loves Yezi, which is reflected in her pity for Yezi's loyalty to her fiancé and admiration for her waiting.
As for the protagonist Shimamura, who exists in the superficial sense, although he is a man with a family, he has gone to the snow country three times to have fun with komako. The author uses a lot of ink to describe the well-off Shimamura is a man who is obsessed with "illusory beauty", he is obsessed with a series of unrealistic things such as Western dance and extramarital love, but there is no character background introduction. From Komako's limited knowledge of him, it is not difficult to find that he actually represents a character who "has no actual existence", and Shimamura is an idealized character and dream savior of Komako's fantasy life that wants to escape from real life, and is more like a synthesis of the men Komako interacts with as a geisha.
Another character, Ye Zi, although he appears as the fiancé's lover, is actually just a former colt, the reason is that before there is no actual marriage contract, the essence of the relationship between men and women is the lover relationship, metaphorically the colt who once did geisha to make money, and then used this money to treat his fiancé's illness; the second is as a figurative personal image of the fiancé's loyal protection, the pure love in the heart of the colt shapes the image of the leaf, instead of her fiancé, it can be seen that the leaf is a past, deceased, and deep-hearted colt. It is the manifestation of the two sides of the colt's unity of desperate life.
The emotional lines of each character are clear but not single, and if you want to figure out the deep meaning of the plot, you must first analyze which people in the story are real story characters and which are fictional characters. In my opinion, the only real characters in the story are Komako and her fiancé, who is seriously ill. As for Shimamura, it is the man that Komako imagined; as for The Leaf, it is Komagome's imagination that is always the same self.
2. Everyone goes through the transition from hope to nothingness
Shimamura is a person who is obsessed with nothingness, and he has long since fallen into nothingness from his normal life and becomes one with it.
Is Leaf a real person? How did the leaf fall into nothingness? In fact, from the role, you can feel her nihilistic tragic fate, such as appearance -
When he unconsciously used this finger to draw a passage on the window glass, somehow a woman's eyes were clearly reflected on it. He was taken aback and almost cried out. Probably because his heart flew far away. When he fixed his gaze, there was nothing.
Her appearance is first a partial mirror image, which implies that The leaf will evolve from a person with "hope in mind" to a desperate person, into some kind of "nothingness" that runs through the main line, and she is like a picture that gradually emerges in the mirror, like a mirror flower and water moon. Later, Shimamura's impression of Yezi changed to think of Komako through her.
Last night Shimamura looked at the face of the leaves reflected on the window glass, and the lights on the mountain flashed on her face, and the lights overlapped with her eyes, slightly shining, indescribably beautiful, and Shimamura's heart was also touched. Thinking of this, I can't help but think of the colt's red face in the mirror against the background of the vast white snow.
What kind of person Ye Zi really is, in fact, Shimamura has no way of knowing.
Leaves that will eventually wither
Leaf's ending is to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of the silkworm house, and her fall completes the fate of life that Leaf is called "Leaf". The leaves are like two sides of the colt, and the lover's lingering breath is like a force hanging from the leaf, and when the lover dies, this force disappears. The life of the leaf enters the void and begins to face the fate of "withering". When Komako saw that the leaf "fell from the second floor of the silkworm house like a doll" unconscious, Komako appeared painful and crazy.
Komako staggered from the crowd to the leaf, picked up the leaf that was struggling desperately, shrugged his sluggish face, and picked up his incomparably cherished heart, but was abandoned by Shimamura, like holding his own sacrifice and sins. The heart died, fell like a doll from the second floor on fire, twitched twice, and died.
The death of the leaf indicates that the colt's expectant love has also entered the void.
3. Watching "Snow Country" is not to see the plot, but the feelings
The reason why I think the protagonist of this book is Komako and not Shimamura, let alone leaves with very few pens. It is because Komako is the only living character in the book. This vividness is embodied in three places: first, the colt is a person who has grown up, and others only explain the current situation; second, the colt has inner contradictions, and others have no inner contradictions; third, the colt is the intersection of desire and emotion, and others are only a single carrier of desire or emotion. In short, Komako is a character with feelings.
First, Komako's personal background is very rich. Once sold to Tokyo as a geisha and needing to earn money to prolong the life of her seriously ill fiancé, she was alone against the ill-fated life, writing a diary, improving her piano skills, and expressing her admiration for Shimamura are all the ways she has always fought against the injustice of fate, which is the composition of her tragic experience.
Second, the inner contradictions of the colt are incomparably complicated. In the past, she simply guarded her seriously ill fiancé on the one hand, and on the other hand, she had to be a plaything of other men in exchange for the money for her fiancé's treatment, and her inner contradictions could only calm her contradictions by conjuring a new, pure, and loyal leaf to her fiancé. Otherwise she would not be able to continue this deformed life and start a new life after her fiancé died. When she sees Leaf jumping off a building in the midst of the monstrous firelight and committing suicide, Komako falls into madness because of the disillusionment of true love, her infidelity to her fiancé, and her inner remorse and despair.
Third, the human characteristics of the colt are very obvious. Komako admires Shimamura, a character who incarnates in the "nothingness", and the character of Shimamura cannot be simply understood as a man with superior economic conditions and a decent social image, but should be understood as the appearance that Komako wants to create for himself. Shimamura is an evolutionary target that any low-level figure aspires to. Komako wants Shimamura to take her to the city to live instead of Komako's desire to become Shimamura, and when she repeatedly expresses her love to Shimamura, it can even be seen as her inability to get rid of her current life situation and longing for someone to lead her to a changed mental state. This is the ambivalence in Komako's heart that she hopes to achieve personal transformation by herself and hopes that someone can help her. In contrast, Shimamura has no inner contradictions, he can enjoy extramarital affairs with peace of mind, and he can ignore the love of Komako; similarly, There are leaves without inner contradictions, as a lover of seriously ill patients, she has no dislike and self-hatred, and her heart is pure and sincere to protect her sweetheart. In fact, it is the expression of the good heart of the colt, the conscience and soul of the colt.
It can be seen that Shimamura and Yezi are not "people" in the pure sense, but incarnations in some sense.
Some people say that the story of "Snow Country" actually ended on the train at the beginning. The mirrored scene on the window glass of the train is uncertain, fluid, instantaneous, and at any time may fall silent, and any effort to restore it is futile.
Kawabata's story is the transformation from "beauty" to "nothingness", and the character leaves are the carriers of this extreme beauty to the process of disappearing, making the beauty of nothingness, the beauty of cleanliness and the beauty of sorrow reach the extreme, which makes people feel excited and sad.
Therefore, when you see the end of the book, komako is crazy with a dead leaf, you will suddenly see a living woman in front of you, she is crying very wronged, extremely sad, extremely sad, we seem to have become an island village, and the milky way in our eyes is the colt.
4. What kind of nothingness will we face?
Shimamura represents the nothingness of life — insensitivity , koma represents the nothingness of longing — nothingness, and leaves represent the nothingness of attachment — the shattering of goals.
What kind of nothingness will we face? Let's go back to Yasunari Kawabata, the author of this book. Yasunari Kawabata's nothingness is suicide, and there are two major tragedies in his life that contributed to his suicide.
The tragedy of Yasunari Kawabata is that he has to watch the people around him die. When he was a teenager, his parents died, his grandfather, grandmother, and sister also died one after another, he constantly witnessed the death of people at a young age, and when he became an adult, he encountered the suicide of his teacher Ryunosuke Wasagawa, his own children died prematurely, and in his later years he witnessed the suicide of his student and friend Yukio Mishima, which made his thinking about the meaning of death far more profound than ordinary people, and also made him a very lonely person from beginning to end.
The beautiful things in his works must be pure, such as the pure first love emotion in "The Dancing Girl of Izu", the pure love between men and women in "A Thousand Cranes", including the pure emptiness of beauty in "Snow Country", indicating that the characters all follow the personality setting of "if you can't live purely, it is better to die purely". This purity, unblemished with any flaws, is the emotional embodiment of his repeated witnessing of death and the torment of loneliness, and constitutes the tragic factor that ultimately chooses to commit suicide.
The tragedy of Yasunari Kawabata is that he has to constantly escape from mental pressure. It is not an exaggeration to say that he is a child, first of all, he basically has no concept of money, he likes to collect art, and often because he has no money, he often borrows money everywhere to buy his favorite treasures, and until his death, there are still foreign debts that have not been paid off. In addition, he is not good at handling the relationship between men and women, and has interacted with four girls with the name "Chiyo", whether it is someone else actively pursuing him, or the candidate he identifies in his heart, the end of these four Chiyo is either Kawabata inferior to dare not accept others, or others have marriage contracts, or do not like him at all. After these relationships, he will feel uncomfortable as soon as he hears the word "Chiyo". It can be seen that Kawabata needs to constantly escape from mental pressure, and love does not help him relieve stress, so he turns to collecting works of art to help him forget the real society
Back in the story of Snow Country, we re-recognize the meaning of nothingness represented by the characters in the story. Is it possible that Komako, as Shimamura's lover in snow country, Shimamura's three visits to snow country are actually Komako's infidelity fantasies of longing for a new decent man to replace her sick fiancé three times while caring for her seriously ill fiancé. Komako's desire to find a better man to replace the fiancé around him who needs to be inseparable is an inevitable desire for life. Shimamura, whom she admires, expresses her love to Shimamura without hesitation, but because the object of her admiration is the embodiment of "nothingness", she is doomed to not respond. Eventually, after her fiancé's death, all illusions are shattered, the colt goes mad, and nothingness takes over her consciousness.
The relationship between men and women in the adult world is not simple- the complexity of the relationship between adult men and women is the endless entanglement of desire and nothingness. Yasunari Kawabata's two tragedies allowed him to see his life as nothing step by step, and eventually committed suicide. So what kind of nothingness will we face?