Re-Reading Yasunari Kawabata: The Winter Imaginary in the Novel Snow Country (Yuki guni, 1935-1937/ 1948)

Filtered by the literary-artistic imagination, nature and the cycle of seasons represent a central theme in the classical literary and visual Japanese culture, known as雪月花 (Setsugekka), or as the theme of seasons changing, a metonymical wording for the beauty of each season. Since the uniqueness of a work of art implies its identification by anchoring it in the context of a tradition, beginning from the Setsugekka theme, the present study aims to circumscribe the imaginary of winter in the novel Snow Country (雪国・Yuki guni, 1935-1937/ 1948), by Yasunari Kawabata. As in a (musical) canon across time, in the postmodern context that suspends the borders between the ‘high brow’ culture and the ‘low brow’ culture, between the original and the copy, the novel Snow Country appears in manga form in 2010, with drawings by illustrator Sakuko Utsugi, thus offering a particular re-reading, an ‘inter-semiotic translation’ of the original text. The present study goes on to analyse the specific vocabulary through which the ‘iconography’ of winter is created in the komikku version of the novel, and to identify the means by which it aims to configure the psychological states and the emotions of the characters. Due to his acute sense of the seasons, through his novel, Yasunari Kawabata succeeds in completing the traditional list of famous places (meisho) associated with the motif of winter in Japan, with the snow country from Echigo.

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