Read for Great Books. I didn’t love it, but some others did.
- “He wondered whether the flowing landscape was not perhaps symbolic of the passage of time.”
- “The bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.”
- “[Her hair] glowed like some heavy black stone.”
- Seeing Komako from the train window: “it was as though one strange piece of fruit had been left behind in the grimy glass case of a shabby mountain grocery.”
- “The beans jumped from their dry pods like little drops of light.”
It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night color. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.
Something none of us understood, when Shimamura talks to Yoko – Jonathan says he’s punishing himself, which I guess makes sense?
But at that moment his affection for Komako welled up violently. To run off to Tokyo, as if eloping, with a nondescript woman would somehow be in the nature of an intense apology to Komako, and a penance for Shimamura himself.
In this book I learned about “Chijimi grass-linen,” a ramie fabric bleached in the snow.