Shimamura wants to seek the truth of life, to truly feel the existence of life, and to feel that he is really alive, but in the end he finds it all in vain. "Now is the autumn mountaineering season. Looking at the mountains with scars everywhere, I can't help but yearn for the mountains. He did nothing all day, and in laziness and inaction, he insisted on climbing the mountain. Isn't it futile? However, only in this way can there be charm beyond reality. " The dead moth is very beautiful in Shimamura's eyes. "Some moths have been parked on the screen window, but they are already dead, falling like dead leaves. Some fell off the wall. Shimamura picked it up and thought, how is it so beautiful? " It can be seen that the beauty of a dead moth is only a futile beauty, or a beautiful futility. "However, the bee fell, crawled, crawled and fell. It seems that he died of natural causes as the seasons went on. In fact, when you look closely, your feet and tentacles are still twitching and struggling. " In Shimamura's view, the existence of life is a beautiful futility and nothingness, so this kind of dying struggle is unnecessary and meaningless, as long as you live or die naturally.
Shimamura has rich property, enviable social status, warm family and lovely children, but he still feels bored, thinks that all existence is futile and meaningless, and even thinks that life is impermanent and nothingness. Even as a geisha flower name, "Komako" contains nihilistic thoughts. According to Kawabata Yasunari, Komako's eye name comes from the myth of silkworm and horse in ancient China. The place where foal began to live turned out to be a silkworm. Have you forgotten your strangeness? ""Shimamura used her transparent body to imagine Foal living here like a silkworm. " Silkworm has a metaphor of self-restraint, while the myth of silkworm horse implies futility and emptiness, and Kawabata Yasunari even completely lost the name "colt".
Relatively speaking, foal corresponds to the secular, functional and physical side of the island village; The leaves are completely opposite to the traditional, poetic and spiritual aspects of the island village. Kawabata Yasunari also said that he did have a prototype in his writing, and the leaves were "invented". As soon as she appeared on the stage, her voice was "beautiful and close to sadness", which brought people auditory beauty and association, and set each other off in the window, showing an "indescribable beauty" from a unique angle. Beautiful, pure, kind and spotless. Her meticulous care for her brother, her patient service to her husband, and her persistence and loyalty in mourning for him every day are the concretization of her innocent character. However, the strange charm and irresistible light of the leaves made Shimamura "ignite the attachment to the pony." Freud said, "The more frivolous and dissolute a woman is, the crazier a man is." . Falling in love with this kind of woman often makes them lose their souls and cannot extricate themselves. But once in love, they are required to be loyal to themselves. "Yoko is the person who fell in love with Komako in Shimamura, and it is the embodiment of the author's admiration for ideal women and the dislocation of physiological tendency.
Komako's life is a heroic tragedy, so in Shimamura's view, all efforts made by Komako are futile and meaningless. It is meaningless for foal to study hard and take notes; It is meaningless to practice the piano diligently in a remote mountain village; There is no point in treating a dying person; It is meaningless to fall in love with the island village that can't love her. What Komako did, for herself, was just to live with dignity and pursue something. She is always struggling with her surroundings, but in the end, her struggle only exists as a kind of nothingness. Her struggle is real, but the final result is nothingness. In this contradiction between reality and emptiness, foal's life has become a truly futile sorrow.
Komako had to sell herself as a geisha in order to repay her master and make money to treat her son. Although she became a geisha, she still looked forward to her beautiful love and happy future. She even started writing diaries and reading notes from the age of fifteen or sixteen. But what Komako did was futile and meaningless to Shimamura. "Even if foal is the young master's fiancee and Ye Zi is his new lover, and the young master is going to die soon, the word" futility "can't help appearing in Shimamura's mind. Komako should do her fiancee's duty, or sell herself to her fiance for illness. What if there are no whites in the end? " Komako went to the station to see Shimamura off, and Ye Ran told Komako that the executioner was dying. He wanted to see her, but Komako refused to go back to see the executioner for the last time and insisted on sending Shimamura away. Most people will be moved by Komako's persistence in love, but her warm feelings met Shimamura, but she was not rewarded at all. This kind of effort is just a beautiful futility, a meaningless effort. The image of leaves is beautiful nothingness. So at the end of the novel, when the mountain of Shimamura was in trouble again, the author arranged an unexpected fire, and the leaves were killed in the fire. Shimamura did not show the grief he deserved. On the contrary, he got spiritual sublimation and spiritual understanding from the death of Ye Zi. He felt that the death of the leaf was as magnificent as the Milky Way. It was just that her "inner life was changing" and the leaf would be free because of "losing life". In the sacred sea of fire, the leaves transcend the foal's "some things are hard to figure out" level and the body. When the foal held the leaf to her chest, "is she holding her sacrifice or punishing her?" At that time, foal and leaves were destroyed at the same time, so the novel came to an abrupt end, and all kinds of images were hidden in subjective sadness and complete nothingness.
The image of leaves expresses the author's longing for a better life. She is the embodiment of "spirit" and the phantom of "beauty". The first appearance in the novel is Ye Zi who shocked Shimamura. "Her voice is beautiful, almost sad, and her loud voice echoes for a long time in the snowy night." "Only one eye of the girl is reflected on the glass, but she looks more beautiful." In Shimamura's eyes, everything on the leaves shows a kind of "pure beauty" and an ethereal beauty. Shimamura used the word "sadness" many times when describing the sound of leaves, which also shows that the beauty expressed by leaves also has sad emotions and is also a kind of sad beauty.
The description of leaves also reflects the author's nihilistic thought. In particular, the description of the image of leaves in the twilight scene seen by Shimamura from the window is a reflection of the author's nihilistic thought, which is also true and illusory, and reality and reality are interlinked. "The matrix of the mirror is a flowing dusk scene, that is to say, the image of the mirror and the scene at the bottom of the mirror are the same, just like the overprint in the movie, constantly changing. There is no connection between the characters and the background. The figure is a transparent phantom with a hazy sunset in the background. The combination of the two forms a symbolic world unlike the human world. Especially on the girl's face, there was a flash of cold mountain, which was really indescribable. The soul of Shimamura was shaking. " "At this moment, in the position of her face, a lantern lit up. The reflection in the mirror is not bright enough to cover the star lights outside the window; The light outside the window is too dim to erase the reflection in the mirror. The light shone on her face, but it didn't illuminate her face. It was a little cold light in the distance, shining in her eyes. When the girl's star eyes overlap with the lights, her eyes are like beautiful fireflies, flying between the waves in the evening. The image of leaves in the novel exists like a dream, which makes people feel like a dream of nothingness in life.