Virginia Woolf's claim that plot is banished from modern fiction is a misguided tenet of Modernism. The plot is not so much eliminated as mapped at a more local level, most obviously with the epic structural confrontation in Ulysses. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf's strategy of indirect speech borrows heavily from impressionism in her exploration of the ways in which painting can freeze a moment and make it timeless. In Kawabata's Snow Country, the story of Yoko and her family and its relationship to the rest of the novel corresponds to an even more modern medium, film, and its superimposition of contradictory images. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Lily Briscoe's metaphor stabilizes the chaotic reality around her, order them into a visible representation, and make them timeless. She shares these goals with the Impressionists, for whom moments of being (as Woolf elsewhere calls them) are also "illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the darkness" (161). The instantaneousness of this image and its dependence on light are crucial to To the Lighthouse; through the single encounter Lily and Woolf start the forest fires. Other parts of the narrative become clarified and resonant through specific moments of consciousness; one character's thoughts feed into those of another, the narrative voice filters through that of everyone else, and the reader sees, as Lily does, the "X-ray photograph" (91) of everyone's desires and fears. The plot is compromised in these scenes, or in the throwaway line in "Time Passes" which incidentally tells us that Mrs. Ramsay died last night. But just as this observation is bracketed, so each moment of being frames something else, a larger context that individual moments reflect and refract. Woolf's work with voice is her legacy, but it is the voice that proves temporary (as in the case of Mrs. Ramsay) and the image, shaped by Lily, that endures. In Snow Country, cinema is Kawabata's chosen subtextual art form. When Shimamura looks up at the dome of the sky, Kawabata uses cinematic imagery to describe his visual journey: "Shimamura imagined that his little shadow was cast against it from the earth. Every single star stood out from the rest, and even the particles silver dust could be seen among the luminous clouds, so clear was the night" (165). Shimamura literally projects himself into the void, through “silver dust particles” which resemble dust illuminated by a projector. The characters of Snow Country are trapped within themselves, with a reduced ability to articulate their desires, but they expand through cinematic images into the infinite landscapes of nature and the Milky Way, just as the traditional plot, although displaced, is illuminated by moments of consciousness throughout the novel. The novel opens with Shimamura looking at Yoko in the reflection of the train window. Early filmmakers used trains to showcase their medium, as the rapidly changing landscape and multitude of framed windows were already an example of "moving images." In Snow Country, as in To the Lighthouse, we are aware that the windows serve three purposes, just as the ocean is used in three visual ways in Moby Dick; we can look at them, through them, or through their reflections. The latter is used most frequently in Kawabata's work, especially in this first scene, and highlights one of the visual tricks of mirrors, in that the reflected image is twice the distance of the object from the source of reflection. That is.