Snow Country (5 page)

“What are you counting?” he asked. Still the counting continued.

“It was the twenty-third of May.”

“You’re counting the days, are you. Don’t forget that July and August are two long months in a row.”

“It’s the hundred-and-ninety-ninth day. It’s exactly a hundred and ninety-nine days.”

“How did you remember it was the twenty-third of May?”

“All I have to do is look in my diary.”

“You keep a diary?”

“It’s always fun to read an old diary. But I don’t hide anything when I write in my diary, and sometimes I’m ashamed to look at it myself.”

“When did you begin?”

“Just before I went to Tokyo as a geisha. I didn’t have any money, and I bought a plain notebook for two or three sen and drew in lines. I must have had a very sharp pencil. The lines are all neat and close together, and every page is crammed from top to bottom. When I had enough money to buy a diary, it wasn’t the same any more. I started taking things for granted. It’s that way with my writing practice, too. I used to practice on newspapers before I even thought of trying good paper, but now I set it down on good paper from the start.”

“And you’ve kept the diary all this time?”

“Yes. The year I was sixteen and this year have been the best. I write in my diary when I’m home from a party and ready for bed, and when I read it over I can see places where I’ve gone to sleep writing.… But I don’t write every day. Some days I miss. Way off here in the mountains, every party’s the same. This year I couldn’t find anything except a diary with a new day on each page. It was a mistake. When I start writing, I want to write on and on.”

But even more than at the diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully catalogued every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.

“You write down your criticisms, do you?”

“I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all.”

“But what good does it do?”

“None at all.”

“A waste of effort.”

“A complete waste of effort,” she answered brightly, as though the admission meant little to her. She gazed solemnly at Shimamura, however.

A complete waste of effort. For some reason Shimamura wanted to stress the point. But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of
the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman’s existence.

Her talk of novels seemed to have little to do with “literature” in the everyday sense of the word. The only friendly ties she had with the people of this village had come from exchanging women’s magazines, and afterwards she had gone on with her reading by herself. She was quite indiscriminate and had little understanding of literature, and she borrowed even the novels and magazines she found lying in the guests’ rooms at the inn. Not a few of the new novelists whose names came to her meant nothing to Shimamura. Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire. It occurred to Shimamura that his own distant fantasy on the western ballet, built up from words and photographs in foreign books, was not in its way dissimilar.

She talked on happily too of movies and plays she had never seen. She had no doubt been starved all these months for someone who would listen to her. Had she forgotten that a hundred and ninety-nine days earlier exactly this sort of conversation
had set off the impulse to throw herself at Shimamura? Again she lost herself in the talk, and again her words seemed to be warming her whole body.

But her longing for the city had become an undemanding dream, wrapped in simple resignation, and the note of wasted effort was much stronger in it than any suggestion of the exile’s lofty dissatisfaction. She did not seem to find herself especially sad, but in Shimamura’s eyes there was something strangely touching about her. Were he to give himself quite up to that consciousness of wasted effort, Shimamura felt, he would be drawn into a remote emotionalism that would make his own life a waste. But before him was the quick, live face of the woman, ruddy from the mountain air.

In any case, he had revised his view of her, and he had found, surprisingly, that her being a geisha made it even more difficult for him to be free and open with her.

Dead-drunk that night, she had savagely bitten her half-paralyzed arm in a fit of irritation at its recalcitrance. “What’s the matter with you? Damn you, damn you. Lazy, worthless. What’s the matter with you?”

And, unable to stand, she had rolled from side to side. “I’ll never have any regrets. But I’m not that sort of woman. I’m not that sort of woman.”

“The midnight for Tokyo.” The woman seemed
to sense his hesitation, and she spoke as if to push it away. At the sound of the train whistle she stood up. Roughly throwing open a paper-paneled door and the window behind it, she sat down on the sill with her body thrown back against the railing. The train moved off into the distance, its echo fading into a sound as of the night wind. Cold air flooded the room.

“Have you lost your mind?” Shimamura too went over to the window. The air was still, without a suggestion of wind.

It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void. As the stars came nearer, the sky retreated deeper and deeper into the night color. The layers of the Border Range, indistinguishable one from another, cast their heaviness at the skirt of the starry sky in a blackness grave and somber enough to communicate their mass. The whole of the night scene came together in a clear, tranquil harmony.

As she sensed Shimamura’s approach, the woman fell over with her breast against the railing. There was no hint of weakness in the pose. Rather, against the night, it was the strongest and most stubborn
she could have taken. So we have to go through that again, thought Shimamura.

Black though the mountains were, they seemed at that moment brilliant with the color of the snow. They seemed to him somehow transparent, somehow lonely. The harmony between sky and mountains was lost.

Shimamura put his hand to the woman’s throat. “You’ll catch cold. See how cold it is.” He tried to pull her back, but she clung to the railing.

“I’m going home.” Her voice was choked.

“Go home, then.”

“Let me stay like this a little longer.”

“I’m going down for a bath.”

“No, stay here with me.”

“If you close the window.”

“Let me stay here like this a little longer.”

Half the village was hidden behind the cedars of the shrine grove. The light in the railway station, not ten minutes away by taxi, flickered on and off as if crackling in the cold.

The woman’s hair, the glass of the window, the sleeve of his kimono—everything he touched was cold in a way Shimamura had never known before.

Even the straw mats under his feet seemed cold. He started down to the bath.

“Wait. I’ll go with you.” The woman followed meekly.

As she was rearranging the clothes he had thrown to the floor outside the bath, another guest, a man, came in. The woman crouched low in front of Shimamura and hid her face.

“Excuse me.” The other guest started to back away.

“No, please,” Shimamura said quickly. “We’ll go next door.” He scooped up his clothes and stepped over to the women’s bath. The woman followed as if they were married. Shimamura plunged into the bath without looking back at her. He felt a high laugh mount to his lips now that he knew she was with him. He put his face to the hot-water tap and noisily rinsed his mouth.

Back in the room, she raised her head a little from the pillow and pushed her side hair up with her little finger.

“This makes me very sad.” She said only that. Shimamura thought for a moment that her eyes were half open, but he saw that the thick eyelashes created the illusion.

The woman, always high-strung, did not sleep the whole night.

It was apparently the sound of the
obi
being tied that awakened Shimamura.

“I’m sorry. I should have let you sleep. It’s still
dark. Look—can you see me?” She turned off the light. “Can you see me? You can’t?”

“I can’t see you. It’s still pitch dark.”

“No, no. I want you to look close. Now. Can you see me?” She threw open the window. “It’s no good. You can see me. I’m going.”

Surprised anew at the morning cold, Shimamura raised his head from the pillow. The sky was still the color of night, but in the mountains it was already morning.

“But it’s all right. The farmers aren’t busy this time of the year, and no one will be out so early. But do you suppose someone might be going out into the mountains?” She talked on to herself, and she walked about trailing the end of the half-tied
obi
. “There were no guests on the five-o’clock from Tokyo. None of the inn people will be up for a long while yet.”

Even when she had finished tying the
obi
, she stood up and sat down and stood up again, and wandered about the room with her eye on the window. She seemed on edge, like some restless night beast that fears the approach of the morning. It was as though a strange, magical wildness had taken her.

Presently the room was so light that he could see the red of her cheeks. His eye was fastened on that extraordinarily bright red.

“Your cheeks are flaming. That’s how cold it is.”

“It’s not from the cold. It’s because I’ve taken off my powder. I only have to get into bed and in a minute I’m warm as an oven. All the way to my feet.” She knelt at the mirror by the bed.

“It’s daylight. I’m going home.”

Shimamura glanced up at her, and immediately lowered his head. The white in the depths of the mirror was the snow, and floating in the middle of it were the woman’s bright red cheeks. There was an indescribably fresh beauty in the contrast.

Was the sun already up? The brightness of the snow was more intense, it seemed to be burning icily. Against it, the woman’s hair became a clearer black, touched with a purple sheen.

Probably to keep snow from piling up, the water from the baths was led around the walls of the inn by a makeshift ditch, and in front of the entrance it spread out like a shallow spring. A powerful black dog stood on the stones by the doorway lapping at the water. Skis for the hotel guests, probably brought out from a storeroom, were lined up to dry, and the faint smell of mildew was sweetened by the steam. The snow that had fallen from the cedar branches to the roof of the public bath was breaking down into something warm and shapeless.

By the end of the year, that road would be shut
off from sight by the snowstorms. She would have to go to her parties in long rubber boots with baggy “mountain trousers” over her kimono, and she would have a cape pulled around her and a veil over her face. The snow would by then be ten feet deep—the woman had looked down on the steep road from the window of the inn, high on a hill, before daybreak this morning, and now Shimamura was walking down the same road. Diapers hung high beside the road to dry. Under them stretched the vista of the Border Range, the snow on its peaks glowing softly. The green onions in the garden patches were not yet buried in the snow.

Children of the village were skiing in the fields.

As he started into the part of the village that fronted on the highway, he heard a sound as of quiet rain.

Little icicles glistened daintily along the eaves.

“While you’re at it, would you mind shoveling a little from ours?” Dazzled by the bright light, a woman on her way back from the bath wiped at her forehead with a damp towel as she looked up at a man shoveling snow from a roof. A waitress, probably, who had drifted into the village a little in advance of the skiing season. Next door was a café with a sagging roof, its painted window flaking with age.

Rows of stones held down the shingles with which most of the houses along the street were roofed. Only on the side exposed to the sun did the round stones show their black surfaces, less a moist black from the melting snow than an ink-stone black, beaten away at by icy wind and storm. The houses were of a kind with the dark stones on their roofs. The low eaves hugging the ground seemed to have in them the very essence of the north country.

Children were breaking off chunks of ice from the drains and throwing them down in the middle of the road. It was no doubt the sparkle of the ice as it went flying off into bits that enchanted them so. Shimamura, standing in the sunlight, found it hard to believe that the ice could be so thick. He stopped for a moment to watch.

A girl of twelve or thirteen stood knitting apart from the rest, her back against a stone wall. Under the baggy “mountain trousers,” her feet were bare but for sandals, and Shimamura could see that the soles were red and cracked from the cold. A girl of perhaps two stood on a bundle of firewood beside her patiently holding a ball of yarn. Even the faded, ashen line of reclaimed yarn from the younger girl to the older seemed warmly aglow.

He could hear a carpenter’s plane in a ski shop seven or eight doors down the street. Five or six
geisha were talking under the eaves opposite. Among them, he was sure, would be the woman, Komako—he had just that morning learned her geisha name from a maid at the inn. And indeed, there she was. She had apparently noticed him. The deadly serious expression on her face set her off from the others. She would of course flush scarlet, but if she could at least pretend that nothing had happened—before Shimamura had time to go further with his thoughts, he saw that she had flushed to the throat. She might better have looked away, but her head turned little by little to follow him, while her eyes were fixed on the ground in acute discomfort.