It only makes sense that Shimamura and Komako fall deeper in love during Shimamura’s second visit in the winter. Christmas and New Year’s is in winter, but so is Valentine’s Day, the day of romance. Holidays for love and family are almost all in winter. Spring is known as fresh beginning, like Shimamura and Komako’s romance. They talk for a while, and then by nightfall, they are sleeping together, thus the blossom of their relationship. They are beginning to care for each other, but like nature, it will not last for very long. Their relationship is beginning to blossom, like that of the cherry blossoms in a Japanese spring. She tells him how rude it is of him to ask her to call him a different geisha, and Kawabata describes this interaction as “scorn in her voice, and yet an affection of quite a new sort flowed between them” (31-32). He defends himself by basically saying that he just wants female companionship, and that it is meaningless. Before then, though, he asks her to call for a geisha for him, and she is offended. Shimamura begins by wanting to be friends with Komako, but not long after this, he sleeps with her for the first time. This is the beginning of their relationship. He begins to talk to her, and he sees their relationship as “friendship more than anything else that he felt for the woman” (19). He describes her as clean – his version of calling her plain. When Shimamura first meets Komako in May by calling for a geisha, he has no immediate attraction to her.

Kawabata uses setting to reflect Komako and Shimamura’s relationship, starting with the blossoming of their love in spring, the peak of their romance in winter, and ending with its death in autumn.

Shimamura visits all of three times in various seasons to rendezvous with Komako, but eventually, their love runs out. He meets Komako, a geisha at the hot spring, and they begin a romance together. In Yasunari Kawabata’s novella Snow Country, a husband and father named Shimamura vacations at a hot spring to search for an affair.

Snow country yasunari