Does Kawabata's novel recognize the horrors of the Geisha system?

Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country (1937, must later English tr.) focuses on a 30-something man, Shimamura, probably married (I think there was a reference to his wife, but not much is made of that), traveling into the eponymous snow country, which is a mountainous region w/ ski resorts in northern Japan, where he will stay at an upscale inn in the small village, a little ahead of the ski season. He indicates that he's just spent 10 days in the mountains - some kind of rustic vacation, perhaps?, it's never really clarified - and now, settling into his room at the inn he seeks the company of a Geisha. He receives a young geisha-in-training, Yomako, and indicates that all he wants from her is some companionship, but the relationship soon becomes sexual (YK, who won the Nobel prize in literature about 40 years ago) is extremely circumspect about this; he's a long way from the the open writing about sexual relations in his Modernist contemporaries). Further complications ensue as S learns that Y has become a Geisha in order to pay for medical care for her gravely ill fiance (though it's not clear whether they actually are engaged). So in some ways this is a novel about the exploitation of women in Japan right up to the modern era: the lack of social (and medical) services, the few opportunities for women to earn a decent living, the horrible lives of the Geishas, as we see that Y, just start out down this path, already tends to drink herself into a stupor, and who can blame her? Yet in another, more disturbing way, this novel is very much from the man's point of view: ordering a Geisha to be delivered to him in the inn, his indifference to his wife and family back in Tokyo, and the expectation that the young woman will not only be his sexual partner but that she might even fall in love w/ him; he's completely unable to recognize the horror of her position in life, the danger, the exploitation, the sheer grossness: he's an OK guy and young and healthy, polite and maybe attractive, but imagine some of the types this poor woman must have to endure. At about 1/3 through this novel, it's not yet clear which way the narrative will balance and still an open question whether the man will recognize the horrors that his young partner must and will endure.