Snow Country Research Articles

Linguistic methods of representing the images of the main characters in Kawabata Yasunari’s novel “Snow Country”

Linguistic methods of representing the images of the main characters in Kawabata Yasunari’s novel “Snow Country”

Garden Range 2: Taungurung rock art rockshelter site reveals 11,000 years of Aboriginal occupation of the Strathbogie Ranges, Central Victoria

This paper provides new insights into the long-term history of Aboriginal use of mountainous Victoria over the past 25,000 years. It presents results of excavations at Garden Range 2 rock art site located on the edge of the Strathbogie Ranges in central Victoria. The excavations were a research collaboration between the Taungurung Land and Waters Council (TLaWC) and Monash University. Results indicate possible ephemeral visitation by the Old People during the Last Glacial Maximum, clear evidence of occupation over the past 11,000 years, and increased activity since 1600 cal BP. The stone artefact assemblage is dominated by flakes of local quartz. Three igneous flakes from ground-edge axes, dating to after 700 cal BP, are contemporary with a grinding stone showing use-wear and residues from stone axe maintenance. The faunal assemblage is dominated by forest and grassland animals, such as macropod and emu, with mussel shells and fish bones indicating the use of nearby Seven Creeks. The rarity of ochre within sediments precludes insights into the age of rock art paintings on the shelter’s surface. Fossil pollen documents the nineteenth-century European forest clearances, a period when Taungurung people’s use of the site became unsafe. Unburnt fragments of rabbit and sheep bone suggest subsequent use of the site as a fox den. Garden Range 2 illustrates Aboriginal use of mountainous central Victoria during periods of significant environmental changes in the Early Holocene and possibly in the Late Pleistocene. These chronological patterns, including increased activity in the central Victorian uplands during the Late Holocene, match emerging chronological patterns of long-term use of other mountainous regions of southeastern Australia. How sites like Garden Range 2 relate to broader long-term Aboriginal use of more elevated sub-alpine and alpine (snow country) zones of central and eastern Victoria is a question for future archaeological research.

Archaism, “Elegant Paraphrase,” and the Chinese Translation of Three Modern Japanese Novels

ABSTRACT The article examines the use of archaization as a strategy of aesthetic translation in rendering modern Japanese fiction into Chinese. The “classical” style, which resurged at the end of the twentieth century after decades of active championing of the vernacular in China, has been deployed in domesticating major Japanese fictional works originally written in quite different registers. Through close textual analyses of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s “Portrait of Shunkin (1933),” Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country (1935–1947), and Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood (1987), this article shows how the inclusion of elements from the literary language significantly reshapes the source texts for the Chinese audience and how attempts were made to justify these stylistic deviations. In reading these cases against the belles infidèles tradition in seventeenth-century France and contemporary translation theories that favor foreignization, one sees the underlying ideology that led to the preference for “elegant paraphrase” in the late twentieth-century China.

Purifying the Narcissist hero; A Feminist study of Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country

This study examines the portrayal of women in Yasunari Kawabata's work Snow Country, specifically focusing on their depiction as individuals characterized by vulnerability, subordination, and objectification. Kawabata Yasunari was a renowned Japanese author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for elucidating the Japanese mentality in his writings.In 1938, he released his most celebrated novel, Yukiguni (The Snow Country). Set in a remote hot spring town in the mountainous foothills of northern Japan, Snow Country is a dismal tale of a love affair between a Tokyo socialite and a regional geisha. In the novel, Women are labelled as weaklings. They are the ones who constantly weep and are frequently abandoned, whereas men are the dominant and stronger species. The narrative depicts women solely as sexual objects for males.

Reflection of Japanese Culture in Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata is a Japanese writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature. One of his most popular novels entitled Snow Country is full of Japanese cultural values. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which the novel Snow Country reflects the life and culture of Japanese society. The method used is descriptive qualitative which describes and analyzes the collected data taken from the quotations of the novel. In analyzing the data, the writers use the mimetic approach and the concept of culture by Hammersley (2019) to reflect aspects of Japanese culture in literary works based on reality. The result of the study proves that the cultural depiction in Snow Country is in accordance with the cultural reality that exists in Japan, and based on the concept of culture by Hammersley, the culture found in this novel are divided in the form of Japanese cultural tools, cultural environment and the life of Geisha. The Japanese cultural tools including traditional drink ‘Sake’, traditional clothes/dress ‘Kotatsu, Kimono and Yukata’, art ‘Kabuki’ and music ‘Shamisen’, art or mode of Japanese houses in Daimyo Period, Traditional Japanese Houses ‘Shouji Sliding Doors’ and ‘Tatami’. Japanese cultural environments are found by the depiction of situations in Hot Springs ‘Onsen’, habits of Japanese society in autumn and winter. The last, one of the cultures of Japanese is also depicted by the art of Geisha, that is the life of Geisha and Geisha house “Okiya”,
 Keywords: mimetic, novel, culture, and Japan

Analysis of the portrayal of women in “Snow Country” through the lens of Mono-no-Aware: Taking the Youko as an Example

Mono-no-Aware is central to traditional Japanese culture and aesthetic consciousness, as well as the essence of Japanese literature. All aspects of Kawabata Yasunari’s masterpiece “Snow Country” are infused with the concept of Mono-no-Aware. The trend is most visible in the depiction of the female figure, Youko. In this study, we analyze the aesthetic consciousness of Mono-no-Aware in the portrayal of characters from both the front and the side, knowing they mainly appear in the aspects of “view of life” and “the interplay of sorrow and beauty”.

Japanized Modern Dance “Bikkono Odori”(Crippled Dance) in Kawabata Yasunari’s <i>Waltz of Flowers</i>(1936)

Kawabata Yasunari’s <i>Waltz of Flowers</i> (1936) is a novel that was originally a screenplay for a movie in which several popular female dancers were going to perform. Although the plan to make this film was abandoned, the screenplay of <i>Waltz of Flowers</i> is a good example of modernist work in the early Showa period, and the subsequent novel displays the crossover characteristics that result from combining film and dance with narrative fiction.</br>However, in previous research on Kawabata’s work little attention has been paid to <i>Waltz of Flowers</i>. Instead, much critical work has been done on <i>Snow Country</i> (1935), which was serialized at the same time, so it must be said that there is a bias in the history of this research. To redress this deficit, this paper firstly presents the critical literature on dance in the 1930s, and emphasizes the cultural context of modern dance, as a basis for reading <i>Waltz of Flowers</i>. In particular, it focuses on the three dance scenes in the novel：Suzuko and Hoshie’s duet at the beginning, Hoshie’s solo dance in the middle, and “Bikkono Odori” (crippled dance) near the end. The paper argues that “Bikkono Odori” was a form of Japanized modern dance which connected the styles of Japanese modern dancers in the 1930s.

Knowledge as Play: Comics by Japanese Modern Literature

In the context of Japanese cultural postmodernism, the phenomenon of resuming literary masterpieces in comic book form appears as a juxtaposition with a specific purpose, resulting in a hybrid form which we would regard as komiXLit. As part of a specific way of knowledge, we interpret komiXLit as an alternative model whose characteristic is that of the combination of two apparently contradicting terms: the “high” literature and the manga pop culture publication, a cultural move placed by the Japanese publishing houses under the credo “understanding literature through manga”. Using the illustrative example provided by the masterpiece authored by Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country (1935-1937/ 1948) and its manga version (2010), with drawings by Sakuko Utsugi, the present endeavour proposes a reading in which the komiXLit version is interpreted as an architectonic structure inspired by the former, in an attempt to identify the dominants of the textual poetics. We propose that the term komiXLit designate the cultural and social phenomenon of resuming the masterpieces of the Japanese literature in manga (comics) versions, as a self-sustainable category within the genre, meant to complete the already existing ones: story manga‚ dramatic pictures, graphic novels, boys’comics, girls’comics, men’s comics, ladies’ comics.

Gazing on the Shōjo: Kawabata Yasunari’s Novels for Girls (Shōjo Shōsetsu)

ABSTRACT Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972), Japan’s first Nobel laureate in literature, is best known today for highbrow novels such as Yukiguni (Snow country, 1935–1947). But in the 1930s and 1940s, Kawabata was deeply involved with the girls’ literary magazine Shōjo no tomo (The girls’ friend) as an editor and an author of novels for girls (shōjo shōsetsu). This article calls for a critical reevaluation of Kawabata’s fiction in terms of his involvement with and appropriation of girls’ culture, through analysis of the novels Otome no minato (The girls’ harbor, 1937–1938) and Utsukushii tabi (Beautiful journey, 1939–1941). Kawabata’s use of the idealized shōjo is consistent in his writing for girls and adults, and is a parallel to the fascist aesthetics and colonial ideology in his work of this time period.

雪国のイノベーションに挑むSnow CoIN（スノーコイン）−5年間のプロジェクトを経て新たな枠組へ−

雪国のイノベーションに挑むSnow CoIN（スノーコイン）−5年間のプロジェクトを経て新たな枠組へ−

A REPRESENTATION OF CHARACTER EDUCATION VALUES THROUGH FIGURATIVE LIVES OF THE GEISHAS IN SNOW COUNTRY: A NEW HISTORICISM PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: Snow Country is the story about the figurative lives of geishas in Japanese society. As a Nobel Prize recipient Snow Country is widely considered to be a masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan, from which the writer configure and represent various cultural and educational values within Japanese community. These values are expressed through a beautiful narration of the life of three important figures, Shimamura the guest and Komako the country geisha, and another country geisha names Yoko. Shimamura somehow likes Komako and therefore visits the resort a few times. Komako really likes Shimamura that she has done a lot of things like a crazy person in love. In addition, there is a bit of healthy competition going on between Komako and Yoko which symbolizes the practices of ‘competitive’ life surrounding the Japanese. Here, as a part of cultural and educational value, the life of ‘modern’ geisha has been justified as one of the ways to keep and sustain Japanese old tradition which have become the basis of most educational practices in the country which worth following.Keywords: Character education value, figurative life, geisha, new historicism

GIẢI MÃ VĂN HÓA NHẬT BẢN QUA MỘT SỐ BIỂU TƯỢNG TRONG XỨ TUYẾT CỦA KAWABATA YASUNARI

GIẢI MÃ VĂN HÓA NHẬT BẢN QUA MỘT SỐ BIỂU TƯỢNG TRONG XỨ TUYẾT CỦA KAWABATA YASUNARI

Yanagita Kunio and the Culture Film: Discovering Everydayness and Creating/Imagining a National Community, 1935–1945

In wartime Japan, folklore studies (minzokugaku) as an academic discipline emerged at the same time as the rise of the culture film (bunka eiga). Both helped mobilize peripheral areas and firmly created the image of a unitary nation. This paper focuses on Living by the Earth (Tsuchi ni ikiru, 1941), directed by Miki Shigeru, and its spinoff photo album titled People of the Snow Country (Yukiguni no minzoku, 1944). Miki filmed rural life and ordinary people in the Tohoku region under the strong influence of Yanagita Kunio, a founder of Japanese folklore studies, and published the photo album in collaboration with Yanagita. In this project, vanishing customs were paradoxically regarded as objects impossible to photograph. However, that paradox enhanced the value of the project and made it easier to construct an imagined national community through the discourse of folklore studies.

PORTRAYING THE WABI SABI PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY IN KAWABATA’S SNOW COUNTRY

AbstractSnow country depicts beauty of nature, people, and love through the characters and the situation with the elements of sincerity, purity, calmness and condusiveness. Beauty itself is one of the major themes in this novel. However, Kawabata has his own perception of the beauty that is different with common perception of beauty. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the philosophy of beauty in Kawabata’s Snow Country. These beauty were analyzed through philosophical point of beauty by Kant and Japanese aesthetic philosophy wabi sabi. In fact, the writer found that almost all of beauty in snow country included the sad element, such as a loneliness in a beauty of nature, sadness in a beautiful voice and a waste effort in a beauty of love. The beauty of unusual, imperfect (Wabi Sabi) was found in the way Kawabata depicted the beauty of the women in this novel; Komako and Yoko. Keywords: Philosophy, Beauty, Wabi Sabi, Snow Country, Kawabata

Inductive Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Interpretation

Inductive Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Interpretation John G. Peters (bio) Reading Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's fine book, Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), which considers the nature of literature and its relationship to cultural and geographical boundaries, has caused me to consider how I approach literature, particularly literature from outside my own cultural experience. As an undergraduate student, I studied both English and philosophy. Many of the philosophy professors at my university were strongly drawn to the works of Hans Gadamer and Edmund Husserl. And I remember a fellow student telling me of one professor in particular who began his class by asserting that Husserl's was a presuppositionless philosophy. My friend then read me the first paragraph of I think it was Cartesian Meditations and remarked on point after point, "Isn't this a presupposition? And isn't this a presupposition?" and so on. I was reminded of this incident when in thinking about this essay I recalled yet another undergraduate experience. My English professors were a bit behind the times in their approach to literature. While many or perhaps most English professors elsewhere were then enthralled with the new developments in literary theory ushered in by poststructuralism, my professors were all New Critics. New Criticism came about as a response to the belles lettres tradition of literary commentary and the biographical/historical criticism of [End Page 826] the early twentieth century, arguing that the former emphasized mere praise with no analysis and that the latter emphasized mere biography/history with no literature. In large part, New Criticism looked to focus on the literature by approaching a literary work in isolation, the poem found in a bottle washed up on a beach as it were, with no indication of the author, culture, or historical epoch in which it was produced—in effect a presuppositionless criticism. Trained in this approach to literature, by my senior year of college, I felt adept at analyzing literature without considering context and in what I considered, I suppose, to be a presuppositionless environment, and I felt that through this methodology I could interpret any piece of literature. That idea quickly exploded in the space of a single class. Along with my studies in English and philosophy, I also minored in Japanese. In my senior year I took my first class on Japanese literature and suddenly realized that rather than being presuppositionless New Criticism in fact concealed many important presuppositions with its high value on ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, and, particularly with fiction, the additional expectations of conflict, complication, rising action, falling action, and denouement. I abruptly discovered these presuppositions upon reading, for example, Kawabata Yasunari's Yukiguni (Snow Country) or the sadly inelegantly English-titled The Makioka Sisters (for the elegant original title of Sasameyuki or Thin-Falling Snow) by Tanizaki Junichirō. I found myself finishing so many literary works in this class puzzled and saying to myself, "What just happened here?" My expectations, that is my presuppositions, of rising action, falling action, denouement, irony, and so on seemed absent from these works, and it was as if I had suddenly been thrust back to my freshman year and was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Ernest Hemingway's The Sun also Rises for the first time and coming away with the same confused response. I then understood that rather than approaching literary works with no presuppositions, I in fact had been approaching them with many presuppositions, and while I may have come to literature without the presupposition of knowledge of biographical or historical context, I had come to it with other presuppositions concerning elements that I had thought were necessary for a literary work to be literary. This experience came to mind as I was reading Thinking Literature Across Continents. If there were a single global culture and a single global language, then there would be no need to inquire into thinking about literature across continents, but of course that is [End Page 827] far from reality. And if we wish to appreciate literature not of our own culture (as I do), then we must look to ways to best appreciate what it has to offer. It seems to...

奥出健著, 『川端康成『雪国』を読む』, 一九八九年五月一二日, 三弥井書店刊, 二四〇頁, 二二〇〇円

奥出健著, 『川端康成『雪国』を読む』, 一九八九年五月一二日, 三弥井書店刊, 二四〇頁, 二二〇〇円

Aragon Théoricien/Praticien du Roman éd. par Katerine Gosselin, Olivier Parenteau

subject. Overall, Glasco’s exploration of intertextuality in Toussaint’s novels—for example the links between Monsieur and Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale, Faire l’amour and Kawabata’s Snow Country, or Nue and Beckett’s L’innommable—is wellreasoned and insightful. She argues, however, that intertextual allusions are not necessarily the result of authorial intent but might stem from the author’s unconscious or the reader: “critics are free to see what the text can support, even in the alleged absence of authorial intention” (160). This can occasionally lead to arguments that appear to be based primarily on coincidence. Discussing L’appareil-photo, she writes of an optimism “we can perhaps relate to Proust” (92) or notes “it certainly seems plausible that Toussaint might be subtly alluding to Rimbaud” by repeating rien ne bougeait (93). At the same time Glasco does not discuss Kafka or Robbe-Grillet in her discussion of La réticence, for example, two authors that Toussaint has specifically mentioned as influences on the novel. Glasco’s text also suffers from repetitions (“These questions are left unanswered at the end of the novel, just as the ending of all of Toussaint’s other works leave us hanging and pondering,” is followed four lines later by“an ending that leaves the reader wondering is certainly no new technique for this author”[190]) and long paragraphs that begin with one subject only to conclude with a different one. Nevertheless, these issues are outweighed by the overall quality of the book, which is an important addition to the critical work on this major contemporary author. Bradley University (IL) Alexander Hertich Gosselin, Katerine, et Olivier Parenteau, éd. Aragon Théoricien/Praticien du Roman. Études Littéraires 45.1. Québec: Université de Laval, 2014. ISBN 978-2920949 -54-6. Pp. 168. $15 Can. This collection of six études sets out to explore and define the prolific literary legacy of Louis Aragon (1897–82) and his constant reflection on “les particularités et les possibilitiés du roman” (7). The authors of this collection focus on the dual and complementary nature of Aragon’s writing as both a théoricien and praticien of the novel, although his writing can be quite vertiginous at times and contradictory.Among the vast amount of writings by Aragon, only specific texts are addressed in this collection, which highlight this duality. Two articles by Claudia Bouliane and Olivier Parenteau focus in particular on the period of Monde réel (1934–51) during which Aragon moves away from surrealist writings to a period of socialist realism wherein the novel comes to represent “la réalité, la politique, l’histoire, l’identité, le sujet [...]. Le roman n’étant pour lui ni un genre ni même une forme” (12). Johanne Le Ray and Katerine Gosselin center their discussions on Aragon’s writings from the 1960s and 1970s, during which we find a constant reflection upon the definitions of roman, écriture , and questions of memory versus invention. Le Ray explores the relationship 262 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 263 between autobiography and the novel, and Aragon’s constant reticence at making distinctions of literary genres. Gosselin’s article compliments this discussion by exploring Aragon’s somewhat contradictory, yet complimentary notions of writing/reading and creation/investigation; she unravels Aragon’s argument in Je n’ai jamais appris à écrire ou les incipit that he does not write his novels, but rather reads them. Olivier Parenteau captures most astutely the duality of théoricien/praticien in his study of Les voyageurs de l’impériale, which Aragon wrote in 1965. Parenteau explains adroitly that this novel is profoundly self-reflective because it centers so closely on the act of writing; the constant intertextual discourse of Aragon’s two main characters, who are writers, come to represent “le travail biographique et fictionnel, soit les deux types d’écriture que le romancier du Monde réel cherche à réunir, à fusionner en vue de créer une œuvre ‘croisée’ et protéiforme, toujours ouverte aux jeux de polysémie” (65). This passage captures beautifully the glissement constant between (auto)biography and fiction that Aragon so skillfully illustrated in his writings, as well as...

Imaging the Rural: Modernity and Agrarianism in Hiroshi Hamaya’s ‘Snow Land’ Photographs

Th is article analyses the Snow Land photographic series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya [1915–1999] in relation to issues of modernity, nostalgia and discourses of agrarianism in 1940s and 1950s Japan. Hamaya is one of Japan’s most celebrated and infl uential documentary photographers at both a national and international level. His Snow Land series presents an idyllic view of life in the small mountain villages of Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, emphasising a sense of community and spiritual meaning that Hamaya perceived to be lacking in modern society. In this sense, Snow Land constituted a critique of modernity. Th rough engagement with theorists such as Heidegger, Foucault and Barthes, as well as critical writings on agrarian ideology, this article investigates the underlying assumptions that govern Hamaya’s depiction of snow country, demonstrating that the series is shaped by a modern worldview and is tied to ideological discourses of agrarianism.

Barriers to translation found by analyzing the English translation of Yukuguni ("Snow Country")

Barriers to translation found by analyzing the English translation of Yukuguni ("Snow Country")

Going to Pot: On the Endurance of the Earth

Going to Pot:On the Endurance of the Earth Peter Whitehead Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. From inspiration to homage Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Early Japanese Kaki glaze, dolomite mouth [End Page 934] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. First dancing girl shape Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Chinese Black Sung with Jun splashes [End Page 935] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. May 2010: Chinese Sung form, Japan overlaid glazes and pattern Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 6. Sung real leaf re-created: The Nohzone Tree ... uses real leaf to create pattern between two glazes. Last done Sung Dynasty, method unknown, eight hundred years ago [End Page 936] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 7. The Nohzone Tree Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 8. The Aladdin's Cave becoming unavoidable [End Page 937] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9. Square pots for one hundred-piece installation Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10. Round pots for one hundred-piece installation [End Page 938] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 11. First-period earthenware in stoneware style Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 12. A Michael Cardew pot from Vumé; the talisman that possessed two men, in different places [End Page 939] This essay, Peter Whitehead's first extended piece of writing on the subject of his pottery, was originally published in Artesian 1 (Winter 2008). Reprinted by kind permission from Gareth Evans. Why let yourself go to pot? Lying in a bed in the Leicester heart hospital, eyes blood-shot and glazed, a day after my hectic arrival by ambulance, having survived a 90 minute angiography which should have lasted 15, my heart suffused (through a leg artery) with pungent dyes, the snaking encircling arteries photographed by x-rays to reveal my fate. How much time left? Minutes later I'd have been in the operating theatre (sic) for an emergency second bypass operation which, I was told afterwards, would probably have killed me. My heart was too weak to take the strain. I was on my last artery—one setback and I'd be dead. My son Harry (not Potter, though soon to be the son of one) secretly asked the consultant to tell me the prognosis, especially as I was now declared inoperable. Was he sending me home to die? "Not quite, not unless—listen Harry, tell your father to stop writing books, and to STOP talking so much!" True, I'd harangued the consultant that I was immortal, and it was all very unfair. And morphine makes me loquacious until it knocks me out. Harry transmitted the warning. A week before this attack, this collapse with acute atrial fibrillation (not fabulation!), brooding a fatal heart attack for months it seems, I'd completed the third novel of my internet-based "Nohzone Trilogy," Girl on the Train. Set in Japan, a plagiarism of the Kawabata novel Snow Country and based on the Noh play Wind in the Pines, the prose was inlayed with hyper-text links to Japanese art—(When in Tokyo do as Tokyo does ... )—many to the legendary [End Page 940] potter Shoji Hamada, acknowledged as the greatest potter of the 20th Century.1 A book of his work was the only volume next to my bed; I was still trying to figure out why one particular pot haunted me. It seemed so irrational to be possessed by a mere pot, an empty vessel of fired clay, enriched with tinted glazes, ideal for a bouquet of dead flowers, or twigs of autumn leaves. Pine, cedar, persimmon. So, stop writing and talking, or die! What to do? As I looked at the pot on the Hamada cover, the famed Mashiko kaki red (dead blood) decorated with ghostly pale figures like the quartz intrusions in grey Cornish basalt or ironstone, the image corresponded disturbingly with those still hovering in my mind's eye of my dying heart. A vessel in bondage. The shape of an African cooking vessel, the blocked swollen...