Snow Country (10 page)

The moonlight, so bright that the furrows in the woman’s ear were clearly shadowed, struck deep into the room and seemed to turn the mats on the floor a chilly green.

“No. Let me go home.”

“I see you haven’t changed.” Shimamura raised his head. There was something strange in her manner. He peered into the slightly aquiline face.

“People say I haven’t changed since I came here. I was sixteen then. But life goes on the same, year after year.”

Her cheeks still carried the ruddiness of her north-country girlhood. In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a sea shell.

“But did you hear I’d moved?”

“Since the teacher died? You’re not in the silkworms’ room any more, then? This time it’s a real geisha house?”

“A real geisha house? I suppose it is. They sell tobacco and candy in the shop, and I’m the only geisha they have. I have a real contract, and when I read late in the night I always use a candle to save electricity.”

Shimamura let out a loud guffaw.

“The meter, you know. Shouldn’t use too much electricity.”

“I see, I see.”

“But they’re very good to me, so good that I
sometimes find it hard to believe I’m really hired out as a geisha. When one of the children cries, the mother takes it outside so that I won’t be bothered. I have nothing to complain about. Only sometimes the bedding is crooked. When I come home late at night, everything is laid out for me, but the mattresses aren’t square one on the other, and the sheet is wrong. I hate it. After they’ve been so kind, though, I feel guilty making the bed over.”

“You’d wear yourself out if you had a house of your own.”

“So everyone says. There are four little children, and the place is a terrible clutter. I spend the whole day picking things up. I know everything will be thrown down again as soon as my back is turned, but somehow I can’t help myself. I want to be as clean and neat as the place will let me.… Do you understand how I feel?”

“I understand.”

“If you understand, then tell me. Tell me, if you see how I feel.” Again that tense, urgent note came into her voice. “See, you can’t. Lying again. You have plenty of money, and you’re not much of a person. You don’t understand at all.” She lowered her voice. “I’m very lonely sometimes. But I’m a fool. Go back to Tokyo, tomorrow.”

“It’s very well for you to condemn me, but how can you expect me to tell you exactly what I mean?”

“Why can’t you? It’s wrong of you.” Her voice was almost desperate. Then she closed her eyes, and began again as if she had asked herself whether Shimamura knew her, felt her for what she was, and had answered that he did. “Once a year is enough. You’ll come once a year, won’t you, while I’m here?”

Her contract was for four years, she said.

“When I was at home, I didn’t dream I would ever be a geisha again. I even gave away my skis before I left. And so all I’ve accomplished, I suppose, has been to give up smoking.”

“I remember how much you used to smoke, now that you mention it.”

“When guests at parties give me cigarettes, I tuck them away in my sleeve, and I have a fine collection by the time I’m ready to go home.”

“But four years—that’s a long time.”

“It will pass in a hurry.”

“Aren’t you warm, though.” Shimamura took her in his arms as she came to him.

“I’ve always been warm.”

“I suppose the nights will be getting chilly.”

“It’s five years now since I came here. At first I
wondered how I could live in such a place—especially before the railroad came through. And it’s going on two years since you first came.”

He had come three times in less than two years, and on each new visit he had found Komako’s life changed.

Crickets were chirping outside in a noisy chorus.

“I wish they’d be a little quieter.” Komako pulled away from Shimamura.

The moths at the window started up as the wind came from the north.

Shimamura knew well enough that the thick eyelashes made her eyes seem half open, and yet he found himself looking again to be sure.

“I’m fatter now that I’ve stopped smoking.”

The fat on her abdomen was heavier, he had noticed.

They had long been apart, but what eluded his grasp when he was away from her was immediately near and familiar when he was beside her again.

“One is bigger than the other.” She cupped her breasts lightly in her hands.

“I suppose that’s a habit of his—one side only.”

“What a nasty thing to say!” Here she was—this was it, he remembered.

“Next time tell him to treat them both alike.”

“Alike? Shall I tell him to treat them both
alike?” She brought her face gently toward his.

It was a second-floor room, but it seemed to be surrounded by croaking toads. Two and three of them were moving from spot to spot, remarkably long-winded croakers.

Back from the bath, Komako began talking of herself. Her voice was quiet and her manner was completely serene.

The first physical examination she had had here—she thought it would be as when she was an apprentice geisha, and she bared her chest for a tuberculosis check. The doctor laughed, and she burst into tears—such were the intimate details she went into. She talked on as Shimamura encouraged her with questions.

“I’m always exactly on the calendar. Two days less than a month each time.”

“I don’t suppose it keeps you from your parties?”

“You understand such things, do you?”

Every day she had a bath in the hot spring, famous for its lingering warmth. She walked two miles and more between parties at the old spring and the new, and here in the mountains there were few parties that kept her up late. She was therefore healthy and full-bodied, though she did have a suggestion of the low, bunched-up hips so common with geisha, narrow from side to side and
wide from front to back. To Shimamura there was something touching about the fact that such a woman could call him back from afar.

“I wonder if I can have children.” And she wondered too if being generally faithful to one man was not the same thing as being married.

That was the first Shimamura had heard of the “one man” in Komako’s life. She had known him since she was sixteen, she said. Shimamura thought he understood now the lack of caution that had at first so puzzled him.

She had never liked the man, Komako continued, and had never felt near him, perhaps because the affair had begun when she was down on the coast just after the death of the man who had paid her debts.

“But it’s certainly better than average if it’s lasted five years.”

“I’ve had two chances to leave him. When I went to work as a geisha here, and when I moved after the music teacher died. But I’ve never had the will power to do it. I don’t have much will power.”

The man was still down on the coast. It had not been convenient to keep her there, and when the music teacher came back to these mountains he had left Komako with her. He had been very kind, Komako said, and it made her sad to think that she
could not give her whole self to him. He was considerably older than she, and he but rarely came to see her.

“I sometimes think it would be easiest to break away from him if I were to be really bad. I honestly think so sometimes.”

“That would never do.”

“But I wouldn’t be up to it. It’s not in my nature. I’m fond of this body I live in. If I tried, I could cut my four years down to two, but I don’t strain myself. I take care of myself. Think of all the money I could make if I really tried. But it’s enough if the man I have my contract with hasn’t lost money at the end of four years. I know about how much it takes each month for an installment on the loan, and interest, and taxes, and my own keep, and I don’t strain myself to make more. If it’s a party that doesn’t seem worth the trouble, I slip off and go home, and they don’t call me late at night even from the inn unless an old guest has asked especially for me. If I wanted to be extravagant, I could go on and on, but I work as the mood takes me. That’s enough. I’ve already paid back more than half the money, and it’s not a year yet. But even so I manage to spend thirty yen or so on myself every month.”

It was enough if she made a hundred yen a month, she said. The month before, the least busy
of the year, she had made sixty yen. She had had some ninety parties, more than any other geisha. She received a fixed amount for herself from each party, and the larger number of parties therefore meant relatively more for her and less for the man to whom she was indentured. But she moved busily from one to another as the spirit took her. There was not a single geisha at this hot spring who lost money and had to extend her contract.

Komako was up early the next morning. “I dreamed I was cleaning house for the woman who teaches flower-arranging, and I woke up.”

She had moved the little dresser over to the window. In the mirror the mountains were red with autumn leaves, and the autumn sun was bright.

This time it was not Yoko he heard, Yoko calling through the door in that voice so clear he found it a little sad. Komako’s clothes were brought rather by the little daughter of the man with whom she had her contract.

“What happened to the girl?” Shimamura asked.

Komako darted a quick glance at him. “She spends all her time at the cemetery. Over there at the foot of the ski course. See the buckwheat field—the white flowers? And the cemetery to the left of it?”

Shimamura went for a walk in the village when Komako had left.

Before a white wall, shaded by eaves, a little girl in “mountain trousers” and an orange-red flannel kimono, clearly brand-new, was bouncing a rubber ball. For Shimamura, there was autumn in the little scene.

The houses were built in the style of the old regime. No doubt they were there when provincial lords passed down this north-country road. The eaves and the verandas were deep, while the latticed, paper-covered windows on the second floor were long and low, no more than a foot or so high. There were reed blinds hanging from the eaves.

Slender autumn grasses grew along the top of an earthen wall. The pale-yellow plumes were at their most graceful, and below each plume narrow leaves spread out in a delicate fountain.

Yoko knelt on a straw mat beside the road, flailing at beans spread out before her in the sunlight.

The beans jumped from their dry pods like little drops of light.

Perhaps she could not see him because of the scarf around her head. She knelt, flailing away at the beans, her knees spread apart in their “mountain trousers,” and she sang in that voice so clear it was almost sad, the voice that seemed to be echoing back from somewhere.

How large the crow is, starting up from the cedar in the evening breeze—so says the poet. Again there were swarms of dragonflies by the cedar grove Shimamura could see from his window. As the evening approached, they seemed to swim about faster, more restlessly.

Shimamura had bought a new guide to these mountains while he was waiting for his train in Tokyo. Thumbing through it, he learned that near the top of one of the Border Range peaks a path threaded its way through beautiful lakes and marshes, and in this watery belt Alpine plants grew in the wildest profusion. In the summer red dragonflies flew calmly about, lighting on a hat or a hand, or the rim of a pair of spectacles, as different from the persecuted city dragonfly as a cloud from a mud puddle.

But the dragonflies here before him seemed to be driven by something. It was as though they wanted desperately to avoid being pulled in with the cedar grove as it darkened before the sunset.

The western sun fell on distant mountains, and in the evening light he could see how the red
leaves were working their way down from the summits.

“People are delicate, aren’t they?” Komako had said that morning. “Broken into a pulp, they say, skull and bones and all. And a bear could fall from a higher ledge and not be hurt in the least.” There had been another accident up among the rocks, and she had pointed out the mountain on which it had happened.

If man had a tough, hairy hide like a bear, his world would be different indeed, Shimamura thought. It was through a thin, smooth skin that man loved. Looking out at the evening mountains, Shimamura felt a sentimental longing for the human skin.

“The butterfly, the dragonfly, the cricket.” A geisha had been singing the song to a clumsy samisen accompaniment as he sat down to an early dinner.

The guidebook gave only the most essential information on routes, schedules, lodgings, costs, and left the rest to the imagination. Shimamura had come down from these mountains, as the new green was making its way through the last of the snow, to meet Komako for the first time; and now, in the autumn climbing season, he found himself drawn again to the mountains he had left his
tracks in. Though he was an idler who might as well spend his time in the mountains as anywhere, he looked upon mountain climbing as almost a model of wasted effort. For that very reason it pulled at him with the attraction of the unreal.

When he was far away, he thought incessantly of Komako; but now that he was near her, this sighing for the human skin took on a dreamy quality like the spell of the mountains. Perhaps he felt a certain security, perhaps he was at the moment too intimate, too familiar with her body. She had stayed with him the night before. Sitting alone in the quiet, he could only wait for her. He was sure she would come without his calling. As he listened to the noisy chatter of a group of schoolgirls out on the hiking trip, however, he began to feel a little sleepy. He went to bed early.

Rain fell during the night, one of those quick showers that come in the autumn.

When he awoke the next morning, Komako was sitting primly beside the table, a book open before her. She wore an everyday kimono and cloak.

“Are you awake?” Her voice was soft as she turned to him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Are you awake?”

Shimamura glanced around the room, wondering
if she had come in the night without his knowing it. He picked up the watch beside his pillow. It was only six-thirty.