Itoguchi Russian translations of Kawabata Yasunari’s prose sometimes surprisingly resemble Alexander Kuprin’s writing style with his heartfelt trust in the narrator, which is very understandable to us. With a beautiful natural language, with portraits of nature and characters endowed with some genuine purity of characters and thoughts. However, there are a number of semantic layers, so radically different that reading this cultural code can be quite difficult. Therefore, Toyoda Shiro’s production of “Snowland” in full meter seems amazing: in it the lines of the story are instantly visualized into images, living thoughts, concepts of morality and duty. And the heroes themselves are perceived not as someone invented, even talented, but as people who once lived completely, who had the fate to love, suffer or hate.
Here is a train racing in full steam through snow drifts, which opens this movie book. In it, Simamura, a young artist, returns to a mountain village with hot springs, where he once tried to find inspiration. He meets Komako again, a girl whose sincerity and purity enchant the man once again. Komako is going to become a geiko – she has to pay the bills for the treatment of Yukio, the son of her shamisen teacher and a childhood friend. That’s the whole story: it is locked between the complex love relationships of Shimamura, Komako, the dying Yukio and Yoko, faithfully caring for him. And if in the novel Komako’s behavior sometimes looks strange, then on the screen, thanks to the expressiveness of facial expressions and gestures, it becomes clear why Simamura could not forget her, and what she is ready for him.
On the one hand, the young beauty is the best version of Chekhov’s Olenka from Drama on the Hunt: without base passions and without the desire to live in prosperity in any way. However, Toyoda decided to draw a parallel with another female character. And when, for a fraction of seconds, Kisi Keiko in close-up slightly flirts in imitation of Vivien Leigh, they are enough to feel the same difference between Koma-chan and Scarlett, and shaking his head disapprovingly in reproach to the director. But in the next moment, torn by an unspoken feeling, an unspoken word, the girl throws herself at the edge of the train, taking her beloved through the snow. It seems that now, like Tolstoy’s Anna, desperate, she will throw herself under the train. Emotional intensity, comparable, perhaps, only with the tightly strained strings of Shimisen Komako on a frosty morning.
Or with threads of "chijimi" fabric, when it is laid out in the snow to whiten. This sudden theme of weaving and kimono production, where the “mother” of fabric is snow, says a lot about people, about the order of things, about their feelings. There is an inextricable connection between the earth and man. The snow-covered landscape seems to whitewash all the platitudes, leaving only the very core and hardships of people’s simple life, the impossibility of breaking out of this snowy country, where the threads of fate are already tightly intertwined in the canvas. Where, as soon as one test ends, another one follows. And so on, day by day, until the debt is given to fate in full.