Reading Kawabata in the Age of Dating Apps
Much of the discourse around dating in the 21st Century constitutes a mistaken notion. With the advent of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, giving people ready access to hundreds of potential romantic partners instantly, many blame the apps themselves for a fundamental change in attitudes towards dating. Many people, whether it be psychologists, social scientists or users of the apps themselves, have complained that apps have irrevocably changed dating behaviors. With a seemingly infinite number of people at one’s fingertips, dating suddenly has become more superficial. Dating profiles, usually image-centric with only limited space for a quick bio, lead to ultimately surface-level judgement of potential partners. Whether these apps forge long lasting relationships is still unclear. The age of dating apps, after all, is still in its infancy, but I think some are missing the point. The truth is, Tinder and Bumble did not create the problems we see in dating today, they aggravated problems that already existed. Enlightenment philosophers deemed humans the most rational beings capable of reason. In my opinion, the fickle, superficial, sometimes downright dishonest nature of romantic love is the ultimate counterargument to this claim.
Nothing pulls back the curtain on the irrationality of romance like a good novel. During my summer in lockdown, between writing my senior thesis, watching New Girl and perfecting my cabbage soup recipe, I curled up with Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, and was reintroduced to a world that felt surprisingly familiar.
Japan in the dead of winter, in certain regions, is covered in snow. From the western coasts of Japan’s main island Honshu, all the way up to the Northern Island of Hokkaido, snow can accumulate up to six feet in height. The region around Nagano prefecture, known for its skiing and hot springs, came to be known as the Yukiguni or Snow Country. It is around this oeuvre that Kawabata crafted a doomed love story between Shimamura, a dilettantish Tokyoite, and Komako, a rural onsen geisha. Onsen geisha were the geisha that worked in the traditional Japanese hot spring resorts. Though they received the same training in entertaining and musical performance as regular geisha, they were regarded as little more than sex workers, due to the fact that they could not keep regular clients. With customers coming in and out of the onsen to bathe and vacation, this was a practical impossibility. This reveals the first gulf between Shimamura and Komako. Komako, in the complex cultural hierarchy of Japan, is very low-ranking, while Shimamura, a rich Tokyo man with a wife and children, is much higher up the ladder. This is ultimately what makes the success of their romance an impossibility, and much of the novel deals with their avoidance of this reality.
In the midst of reading this very moody novel, my breaks often constituted either swiping through dating apps or texting my friends. It was here that I began to see the connections between Komako and Shimamura’s doomed romance, and the contemporary relationships of me and my friends. Kawabata wrote a romance with an inherently unequal dynamic. Shimamura, the married man, seems much less invested in the relationship than Komako does. He is aloof, distant and bored around Komako. His romantic ties seem transient at best with all of his partners. He leaves his wife and family in Tokyo to go on long vacations in the Snow Country, and then ultimately neglects Komako as well. Shimamura spots Yoko, another young woman living around the onsen, and ultimately develops some interest in her (although they never become romantically involved). This affection is ultimately superficial as well, and Kawabata describes it in relation to Yoko’s appearance. Shimamura, the aristocratic writer with fleeting fancies such as western ballet, thus engages in behavior common within modern romance, entering a relationship due to boredom. I hate to say it, but I have seen countless relationships where one partner regards another as only a means to the end of preventing boredom.
Shimamura’s inadequacy as a lover to Komako is also an important theme in Snow Country. His ultimate apathy towards Komako is demonstrated perfectly in his inability to keep his promises to her. He promises to write letters to Komako, to visit her sooner, but he does not write and comes back months, rather than weeks later. Of course, nothing prevents Shimamura from shirking these promises. After all, he is only a client and Komako is only a Geisha. However, one thing seems clear: apathetic lovers will not keep promises if they don’t need to. What happens then, when our liaisons move online? Apathetic lovers take advantage of the platform and “ghost” their partners. They won’t be held accountable for their actions. Especially now during a pandemic, when we may be risking our lives to see one another in person. What are we to do when the threat of a person cutting off contact constantly hangs over our heads? For Komako, she resorts to desperation. She pleads with Shimamura to stay, constantly bursting into his room drunk in the middle of the night. It’s obvious, whether intentionally or not, that Shimamura puts Komako through emotional torture.
Ultimately, Shimamura and Komako’s relationship is realistically human and not unlike the relationships young people engage in today. I have a feeling that their relationship would play out exactly the same in 2020, if they had met on a dating app. The impulses to seek romance in boredom, to seek comfort in the arms of people undeserving of our love, have likely been around since Homo Sapiens first emerged. Dating apps have only accelerated and brutalized an already brutal reality. Shimamura, like so many others, is shallow, even without dating apps. My point is this: dating apps don’t make us more superficial or apathetic. It does not remove our empathy. Characters like Shimamura show us the universality of human cruelty, especially in romance. What can we learn from Snow Country then? I would say that the lesson I drew from it is that we are all humans, endowed with an inexplicable irrationality, and we should therefore treat each other with a considerable amount of empathy. After all, we do have the ability to think outside ourselves, which not many other species do.