When I arrived in Japan, language difficulties locked me in a silence I had never experienced before and without any other outlet, I immersed myself in books.
I had access to one of the few bilingual libraries in Osaka and I started devouring novels on Japan.
One of the most famous books of the Japanese literature is called “Snow Country” and it was written by Yasunari Kawabata.
“Snow Country” is translated as “Yukiguni” in Japanese.
It is an expression of the modern language that the Japanese use in abundance and with pride. “Nihon, yukiguni” “Japan, snow country” is frequently heard in conversation.
Personally, I had difficulty to understand this metaphor.
The winter was rough. I realized that my current winter wardrobe would not serve me and I so invested in a very long and very warm coat.
However, the snow itself was a fairly rare occurrence. I had seen some white gold on the mountains surrounding Kyoto, I had also seen a few snowflakes in the city of Tokyo. It had nothing in common with the unreal scenes of the work of Kawabata.
Maybe the Japanese people, fascinated by the land of plenty of this writer, had decided to humour him and to include it in their own heritage.
It took me a very long time to discover that winter in the West and in the East of the Japanese Alps are two radically different realities.
The land of Kawabata is in the West, the place where the most beautiful Japanese women on the planet wait for you in kimono on the platform of the railway stations.
And in this snowy country where flakes never stop falling, their faces only emerge at the very last moment, as if their beauty had arisen to finally give color to the landscape.
It is Toru who took me to the snowy country in the middle of the winter.
It is he who showed me on the road to Ishikawa, on the slow train of this remote region of Honshu, the tunnel where you officially move from the East to the West.
All of a sudden, magically, at the end of this famous tunnel, I arrived in the land of snow and its immaculate silence.
I said goodbye to the sun, I closed my long black coat and I donned my furry hat. I put on my two pairs of gloves and I started to move. We walked for hours in this country of snow.
It is on that weekend that I finally understood the term “Snow country” and it is also at this point that I started enjoying the infinite poetry of Kawabata.