Major themes in Kawabata's Snow Country

About 3/4 though reading Yasunari Kawabata's 1937 novel, Snow Country, and am still unsure how to interpret and what YK's attitude is toward the Geisha culture and the, today, obvious exploitation of young women. In this novel about a young man who hikes in the mountains of "snow country" (an equivalent in the U.S. to the White or Green mountains, for ex.) and then stays in a country inn where he expects and receives the services of a young Geisha (in this case, a Geisha in training no less, only 20 years old at the most). YK has a few moments when he shows us or hints at the hardships that the Geishas endure: working so as to pay the medical bills of a mortally ill fiance or family member, working under 4-year contracts that are as binding as indentured servitude, the need to accommodate all sorts of travelers, many of whom must be complete boors or worse, and added to that, for those women who cannot or will not endure those dangers, hardships, and humiliations, we see a sign posted at a rice field offering daily wages for rice harvesters, w/ women receiving 40% less than the male laborers. So at times this seems like a expose of a brutal system, but what about his central characters, Shimamura? He is a man of privilege (doesn't have to work for a living, is kind of an aesthete), who hires the Geisha in training, Komako, and doesn't think or blink at all about her situation in life; she's so desperate and troubled that she gets blind-and-staggering drunk several times in his company - and what does that bode for her future? But all S can do is say, yes, I'll see you same time next year. He imagines, and YK seems to endorse this view, that she can be in love w/ him and will wait for him and remember him and greet him w/ joy and pleasure each time he returns to the inn. More realistically: She would have dozens of "customers" and would feed them all the same line, to make each feel that he's special (modern-day similarity: the programmed voice of a girlfriend in the movie Her). He can offer her nothing special, not even marriage (he's already married!, though YK mentions this only in passing, as an irrelevant detail). So to make this a truly pointed and sociopolitical novel, Shimamura would have to get what he deserves, something would have to awake in him a sense of responsibility for his own cruelty and for his participation in this corrupt system. YK's failure, so far, to turn on his lead character makes this novel feel strangely cold and indifferent - though of course that may be the point: YK avoids the polemical and crafts a "cool" novel (qv McLuhan) so as to draw us in and arouse our anger.