You Are Not a Fish: How Do You Know Its Joy? — Zhuangzi, “Autumn Floods”#

The train window in Snow Country begins as misted glass. Shimamura clears a line with his finger, and one of Yōko’s eyes appears. Knowing it is the reflection of someone opposite, he pretends to admire the evening landscape and wipes more glass with his palm.

Yōko is nursing an ill man. She adjusts a loose scarf and promptly replaces the garment slipping from his feet. The repeated motions make Shimamura a little impatient. Yet her reflection overlaps the passing twilight outside, and patient and caregiver seem to travel somewhere infinitely distant. A light in the fields passes through her eye. The beauty makes him shudder, as though he has glimpsed the workings of a dream.³

Readers can receive this beauty too. Eye and distant light really give an ordinary carriage a new distance and illumination. Dismissing it as mere falsehood would fail to read how the novel moves us.

Yōko, however, does not share Shimamura’s vision. She is concerned about the patient and her brother, newly employed by the railway. Leaning from the window, she repeatedly calls the stationmaster, asks him to look after her brother and to tell him to come home when off duty. The stationmaster’s cold and the brother’s work occupy the same place as the beautiful voice Shimamura hears. That voice asks for something. It is not there only to sound lovely.⁴

Zhang Dai’s “Watching Snow at the Lake-Heart Pavilion” speaks of going alone, then mentions two or three people in the boat. Refuting “alone” by counting heads is rather obtuse: it describes leaving ordinary company to experience snow undisturbed. At the pavilion, however, two men are already seated and a boy heats wine. They are delighted to see him, as though they too awaited an improbable visitor. What began as one person’s obsession finds others with whom to drink.

The boatman speaks at the end: do not call the gentleman alone an eccentric; there are others as eccentric as he. The snow watcher reduces human figures on the lake to a few specks. The boatman puts the watcher back among a kind of people. The ending cancels neither snow nor obsession. It lets the man who felt he went alone hear how another sees him.⁵

This adds more than an expense sheet beneath the view. Furs, warmth and a boat enable the outing, but the boatman can also offer another account of it. His standing does not become equal to the gentleman’s. He nevertheless exceeds the use of transporting him to a destination.

Komako has such moments too. Asked about her lodging, she says her hosts are kind and lay out her bedding at night. Unfortunately they do it unevenly. It bothers her, but she cannot slight their kindness. There are many children, and the room is always disordered. She tidies through the day, knowing the disorder will return, yet wants to live as cleanly as circumstances allow.⁶

Cleanliness was one of Shimamura’s words of admiration. Now she uses it for her days: a room, bedding, another’s kindness and something she cannot neglect. This order consumes time and conflicts with people’s habits. Her life has standards that cannot all dissolve into purity in his eyes.

Does he understand her feelings? He says he does. Then explain them, she says. He cannot. Angry, she calls his life luxurious and his manner careless. Later she asks him to visit once a year while she remains there.⁷

She wants the man so deeply moved to do something in accordance with what she says.

The One I Seek Is Across the Water — Book of Songs, “Reeds”#

Shimamura studies Western dance without having seen Western dancers perform in person.

Earlier he seriously read old records of Japanese dance, visited masters, knew young dancers and wrote criticism. When dissatisfaction made him consider direct involvement, and young people invited him, he abruptly turned to Western dance, collecting books, photographs, posters and programs. The novel specifies that his new pleasure lies in being unable to see it personally. With no living body to correct him, paper shadows can dance to his imagination.⁸

This is more complex than laziness. He expends effort collecting materials and can write articles. The effort serves a peculiar distance, sparing him demands of actual contact while making something appear desirable there. When he discusses dance with Komako, knowledge finally functions between living people. The narration promptly asks whether he treats her like Western dance too.

In The Fragile Absolute, Žižek follows Lacan in distinguishing the object of desire from its cause. Someone may be the object pursued, while what makes her desirable in a particular way is a detail, a distance, even a mediation that apparently obstructs approach. Obstacles need not merely diminish desire; they can help form it.⁹

The distinction does not expose a supposed absence of love. It first separates a person from the role she plays in a scene. Komako may be desirable through distance without living for distance alone. She wants visits, reading and a preserved body; Shimamura’s replies can irritate her. Keeping her distant can preserve an image. Letting her speak clearly reveals where it must change.

She calculates her term of service and income and refuses to overwork her body simply to shorten the term. Four years could be reduced to two through all-out effort, but she values her living body. Principal, interest, tax and food expenses must be counted; once covered, she need not work herself to death for more.¹⁰

This is not a statement of sacrifice addressed to Shimamura. She cherishes her own life. Whether the purity he obtains by calling it wasted effort can accommodate that care is another matter.

A lover should remain a finite person facing difficulty alongside oneself, rather than embody the world’s ultimate order, as though obtaining her completed everything. The distinction does not abolish irreplaceability. Being irreplaceable through shared years and having to guarantee an entire life’s fulfillment are different claims.

I Cannot See Mount Lu Whole, for I Am Within It — Su Shi, “Inscribed on the Wall at Xilin Temple”#

Hajime in South of the Border, West of the Sun is more practically capable than Shimamura.

He runs two bars: purchasing supplies, hiring, keeping accounts, trying menus and observing customers. His father-in-law helps with location, loans and interiors, and he recognizes these conditions. He also builds the businesses seriously through judgment and labor. Work gives him pleasure, as does family. He takes his older daughter to kindergarten, sings with her in the car and returns to play with the younger. The family watches fireworks, rows and walks in Hakone.¹¹

Nor did Yukiko initially attract him merely because the circumstances were suitable. He even says another woman on their trip was more beautiful, yet he fell for Yukiko. The attraction later seemingly available only through Shimamoto has already described his wife.¹²

The life before Shimamoto’s return cannot therefore be declared false in its entirety because he later wavers. He really loves and works within it, and senses something there that is not his. Holding the steering wheel and listening to music, he knows his father-in-law’s money and methods gave him a route others could not easily take. How much in his hands truly belongs to him? How much of this life was prepared by someone else?¹³

He knows how his place was made. He is even good at making such places for others.

When Shimamoto asks why the drinks taste good, he discusses the bartender’s skill and salary, and how he imagines a customer: whom they bring, what they spend, where they live, when they must get home. Detail by detail, the bar takes form. He calls it a hanging garden; people pay to enter a carefully made imaginary place.¹⁴

Shimamoto wants to hear this. She asks him to continue and says how wonderful it is to hear him talk this way. Everyday management is not the absolute opposite of the world she represents. Talking about work can be an occasion for mutual admiration.

Later in Hakone, however, Hajime says family and work are good and make him happy, yet are insufficient. He has a hungry gap neither wife nor daughters can fill. Only Shimamoto can. He advances her irreplaceability into an exclusive guarantee for his entire life.¹⁵

The garden he made no longer suffices, so he hopes another person will turn life itself into home. A life with unmet needs differs from a lack whose single solution is obtaining this person. Reasons to change life do not establish that inference.

In love, willingness and compulsion sometimes exchange places. For love, people willingly undertake ordinary tasks they once disliked. They also experience helplessly falling for someone as the wish most faithful to their hearts. This exchange can give everyday life meaning and burden another with too much meaning.

Marriage once made Hajime believe he had a place to love and be loved. Shimamoto’s reappearance makes him believe a missing part has finally been found. Place these genuine feelings together and the sharp question appears: if both are real, does either have the right to deprive others’ lives of weight?

Shimamoto is not merely something to look at. She explains that she cannot come whenever he wants and asks whether he really accepts all of her, including what she carries and drags behind. What about his wife and two daughters? He says he has decided. She disappears the next morning, denying even his wish to find a note.¹⁶

Her departure interrupts the possibility of shared life without explaining her motive sufficiently to settle it. Calling her disappearance an act that saves his family would assign an unknowable person the function most convenient for the narrator. She can have a life the story does not disclose. Nondisclosure is not nonexistence.

They Knew Not of Han, Much Less Wei or Jin — Tao Yuanming, “The Peach Blossom Spring”#

On the affair route’s train, Haruki too arranges how to see.

Kazusa sleeps; he wakes her. She wants to continue dreaming. He refuses and asks whether she has read Kawabata. Who is that, she asks, a conductor or composer? He tells her to stay close to the window and counts down: three, two, one.

White arrives before them.¹⁷

Snow, Kazusa says. So white. Haruki agrees. The snow brings earlier days: Strasbourg, then Christmas Eve five years ago, when there were three. The two now feel nostalgia and happiness, pain and sorrow. Snow has not washed history clean. It overlaps several histories before them.

This does not replicate Snow Country’s geography, as Haruki’s narration acknowledges. He borrows its form of arrival: beyond the tunnel, a familiar world seems suddenly to recede and another self can appear. Internally, he calls his public conformity a performance and the self turned away from the world genuine.¹⁸

Literary arrival supplies his choice with another name.

At the inn they imagine unending snow stopping cars and trains, trapping them there. Nature cannot be defied, Haruki says. Nothing to do but stay. They joke about an ice age and global cooling, laugh at the absurdity, while he seriously wishes inside that the snow would never melt and they would have to remain together forever.¹⁹

Ignorance of weather does not produce this wish. They know they are imagining; Haruki also knows Kazusa chose the destination and he did not object. Precisely because people have already chosen, they want nature to take responsibility for what follows. “I want to stay” becomes “Nobody can make me return.”

Murakami’s novel offers a similar, different wish. At a snowy airport with Shimamoto, Hajime hopes their plane will not leave. His wife would discover the truth and he would no longer need to lie: he could stay and let events unfold. After their return, Shimamoto explicitly says she too hoped the flight would be grounded. He wants to say the same and merely takes her hand.²⁰

Weather could expose the secret for the concealer and make staying seem unavoidable for both. Shared wishes do not mean an agreed life after disclosure. Tacit understanding supplies similar feelings, not a common future.

In The Plague of Fantasies, Žižek discusses another support: turning an intractable difficulty into successive accidents, so hope remains that the next attempt could succeed. The structure sustains desire and relocates a relationship’s difficulties into its obstacles.²¹

Snow performs opposite jobs in the affair route’s fantasy. The outside world obstructs complete togetherness; heavier snow is the desired obstruction that would keep that world away. Exclude one barrier and thicken another, and undisturbed love seems obtainable.

Observing that transport never really stops would still miss the point. Even if roads closed, Setsuna would not have joined the initial agreement, someone would still handle the work, and Kazusa’s body and wishes could still change. Transport difficulties can explain why someone cannot leave one day. They cannot alone determine a lifetime’s love.

Leaving an old place can certainly create new freedom and replace oppressive relations. Departure’s value lies in what it opens. The problem here arises elsewhere: when lovers refuse to let new facts and the other’s answers alter the direction of departure, and want the landscape to guarantee their original wish forever.

Zhongzi, I Beg You: Do Not Cross into My Village — Book of Songs, “Zhongzi, I Beg You”#

Entering the relationship, Kazusa asks only for false love, leaving the real kind to Setsuna until she leaves Japan at winter’s end. The limit appears to place an exception alongside normal life. Their later continuous cohabitation and flight last several days, not an entire winter.²²

To keep two lives operating, Haruki invents numeric codes. “A meeting at four” sounds like a work message for his superior. Kazusa hears that Setsuna will visit. Four instructs her to vacate the adjoining room for a night. Haruki tells himself that since Kazusa agreed, nobody will hear and nobody will be hurt here.²³

She never complies. When the neighboring door opens, he discovers she has been there all along. Staying elsewhere is troublesome, she says, and she wants to see him now. His anger first addresses disobedience. Then he asks why she could not conceal it to the end.²⁴

He knows the instruction is vile; his narration does not hide his conduct. Knowing its vileness, he still wants obedience, or at least to believe in it. The secret schedule protects two appointments and a bearable image: kept separate, nobody is hurt in the same place.

Kazusa has already helped imagine ways not to harm Setsuna. She asks him to maintain ordinary contact and weekends with her, wanting only their private time for herself. She participates in the arrangement and does something outside it in actual life. Even a two-person secret contains another person one participant has not mastered in advance.

At the inn, space becomes more secluded. The need to listen to each other does not vanish when outsiders are shut out. In a sexual scene, Kazusa explicitly asks Haruki to stop and he continues. Later she asks whether he has done this with anyone else. He says only her; she reiterates that she has not given permission. Only after further exchange does she accept and actively participate. Both moments are in the text. Subsequent desire cannot turn the earlier refusal into consent.²⁵

The passage separates outside prohibition from her unwillingness at that moment. Treat both as society obstructing true love, and however distant outsiders become, only one person’s wish may retain interpretive authority inside.

The night before leaving, Kazusa says she must return to piano and Haruki to work. He interrupts and proposes going farther north: mountains, or perhaps a city, Sapporo; surely the snow will be finer.²⁶

Distance begins revealing a use. If this place cannot preserve their world, choose another. When unwelcome words approach, connect them to the next destination. Imagination moves forward; the person present has not finished speaking.

In the morning, Kazusa first says she planned the ending from the beginning, then admits the lie. Until last night she still wanted to flee with him. She decided to separate just now on seeing his smile. She still loves him and fears he will keep straining and destroying himself to protect her.²⁷

Through her current understanding, Kazusa imagines his future happiness for him. Haruki may question that understanding; he cannot preserve last night’s decision for her. She has changed her mind and brought the change before him. “As long as two people who love each other are together” no longer describes enough. Lovers too can give different answers about continuing.

Draw a Blade to Cut the Water: It Flows On — Li Bai, “Farewell to Uncle Yun at Xie Tiao Tower”#

It becomes easy to say that returning is better after all.

The Sting of Death refuses to settle that “better” readily. At the opening, a wife who has discovered her husband’s prolonged deception demands no further lies. In his narration, ten years of his life seem to become a footnote to one sentence of hers. She asks what he understands of the most ordinary things: kitchen, floor, wages. A servant would at least be paid; a wife’s labor has been taken for free. Her exertion has not compelled him to see it seriously.²⁸

Her questions have definite grounds. He still conceals old photographs and letters, regarding them as his final support before his wife. She asks; he delays. Delay makes disclosure harder, and new disclosure confirms that the earlier account was incomplete. Suspicion has not arisen from nothing.²⁹

Yet the promise that full disclosure will restore life can take the marriage elsewhere. Late in the novel, she decides the past remains unsettled while his letters to his lover remain in that woman’s hands. He thinks retrieval impossible. She proposes feigning reconciliation with the other woman, becoming close and deceiving her into surrendering the letters.³⁰

In this proposal, the lie initially to be eliminated becomes the means of complete truth. Renewed contact would produce more to explain. Peace always lies one step ahead: obtain the letters, clear this piece of the past, and living can begin.

The inquiry originates in her injury and deepens through his continued concealment. A demand can have ample grounds and become endless in execution. If shared life must wait until no past remains and nothing future can arouse suspicion, life is continually postponed.

The ending moves to a hospital. The husband accompanies his wife into a ward with bars and locked doors. Finding no bedding on his own bed, he goes out to fetch it. The sights and voices outside lighten him; his wish to work returns. Immediately he remembers her waiting alone in the ward. Relatives care for the two children and temporarily carry on daily life. He cannot be certain what new life the couple can begin beside that bed once he brings the bedding back.³¹

The hospital supplies new conditions and makes leaving difficult for her. This ending provides no family portrait restored to normal. One person’s temporary freedom and the other’s restrictions remain unequal, wherever they restart.

A world of exception is therefore not confined to a distant inn. Fantasy may promise that complete confession and restored normal status will make home whole again. The Sting of Death tests that hope: the same house and marital titles do not suffice to restore hurt people’s capacity to live.

Yet She Says: Where This Heart Finds Peace Is Home — Su Shi, “Calming the Waves: For Yuniang”#

At the end of South of the Border, Yukiko does not merely welcome Hajime back.

Does he want to separate? He replies that he loves her. That was not her question, she insists. He then says he does not want to separate and perhaps lacks the right to say so. She asks him to set eligibility aside, then says he has indeed hurt her.

He keeps explaining himself: wanting to become someone else, changing places and personalities while the same lack persists within, unable to guarantee that effort will prevent another injury. She listens, then says he is not the only person pursued by lost things.³²

Yukiko has old dreams too. Before meeting him, she relinquished things herself and still does not know whether she was right. Life with him has really made her happy. At night she nevertheless dreams of someone bringing those lost things back and wakes drenched in sweat. She is not a completed person supplied as a home for an incomplete husband.

Her words change home. Here too are unrealized wishes, an uncertain future and another life never asked about. To remain together, Hajime cannot cast himself solely as a traveler returning from a storm and her as an immovable shore.

He proposes beginning again tomorrow. She reminds him he has not asked what she thinks. He finally changes the decision into a question, and she agrees. The new day arrives. Knowing he should wake his daughters, he still sits unable to rise.³³

Agreement does not become completeness, but a question really has been asked. Previously, looking at her, he often saw chiefly the protection he received. Continued love would require learning that she too lacks, has things she refuses to repeat and can make his days unfamiliar.

After discussing desire’s cause, Žižek also attempts to distinguish love from desire. Love does not continually check whether the other retains the feature that fascinates; it can discover further lovable aspects through the person loved. Komako’s and Yukiko’s voices can be received here. No longer fitting the original picture need not leave love nowhere to go. It may give love its first chance to change with the person.³⁴

The affair route’s ending must not prejudge Kazusa True’s later life. Haruki and Kazusa really live together abroad, with work and ways to speak to a distant mother. They do not love only while unattainable. Essay VI examined new abilities and remaining disagreements: elsewhere can become life, and once it does, two people still have things to face.³⁵

Nor does Fugutaiten, after the affair route, make Setsuna an all-purpose guarantee of homecoming. Haruki internally acknowledges the value of her help alongside medication, treatment, others’ efforts and time. When she asks about Kazusa, however, he stops the subject because he cannot withstand intense stress. New support exists, as do limits on conversation. Recovery need not be denied, and the past cannot be declared entirely accommodated.³⁶

“Where this heart finds peace is home,” extracted alone, readily becomes a convenient consolation offered by an observer. Su Shi’s lyric first supplies a question: surely Lingnan was unpleasant? The question already contains its expected answer. “Yet she said” then lets Yuniang’s reply turn it elsewhere.³⁷

That turn deserves preservation. Peace of heart is not an observer’s verdict on a traveler’s life, nor a feeling everyone arriving somewhere must share. The lyric lets the person questioned alter the answer. We may long for somewhere to settle ourselves and also listen to what a companion arriving there says.

Snow can be beautiful; travel can give real joy. A lover can change the meaning of both because she lives within them. If she wants to stay, there must be means to stay. If she wants to speak, spoiling the atmosphere cannot cancel her words. If she wants to leave, yesterday’s happiness cannot disqualify today’s answer.

Real life need not hide beyond the tunnel. It also exists beside a table long occupied, in a question never asked before and finally spoken now. When the person before us has a new answer, the place before us can change too.

The next essay, “We Need Not Have Met Before,” follows how meetings and conversations change the positions people occupy and what the women can subsequently do together.