Snow Country (13 page)

In the women’s bath next door, Yoko was bathing the innkeeper’s little daughter.

Her voice was gentle as she undressed the child and bathed it—soothing and agreeable, like the voice of a young mother.

Presently she was singing in that same voice:

“See, out in back
,

Three pears, three cedars
,

Six trees in all
.

Crows’ nests below
,

Sparrows’ nests above
.

And what is it they’re singing?

‘
Hakamairi itchō, itchō, itchō ya.
’ ”
^†

It was a song little girls sang as they bounced rubber balls. The quick, lively manner in which Yoko rolled off the nonsense-words made Shimamura wonder if he might not have seen the earlier Yoko in a dream.

She chattered on as she dressed the child and led it from the bath, and even when she was gone her voice seemed to echo on like a flute. On
the worn floor of the hallway, polished to a dark glow, a geisha had left behind a samisen box, the very embodiment of quiet in the late autumn night. As Shimamura was looking for the owner’s name, Komako came out from the direction of the clattering dishes.

“What are you looking at?”

“Is she staying the night?”

“Who? Oh, her. Don’t be foolish. You think we carry these with us wherever we go, do you? Sometimes we leave them at an inn for days on end.” She laughed, but almost immediately she was breathing painfully and her eyes were screwed tightly shut. Dropping her long skirts, she fell against Shimamura. “Take me home, please.”

“You don’t have to go, do you?”

“It’s no good. I have to go. The rest went on to other parties and left me behind. No one will say anything if I don’t stay too long—I had business here. But if they stop by my house on their way to the bath and find me away, they’ll start talking.

Drunk though she was, she walked briskly down the steep hill.

“You made that girl weep.”

“She does seem a trifle crazy.”

“And do you enjoy making such remarks?”

“But didn’t you say it yourself? She remembered
how you said she would go crazy, and it was then that she broke down—mostly out of resentment, I suspect.”

“Oh? It’s all right, then.”

“And not ten minutes later she was in the bath, singing in fine voice.”

“She’s always liked to sing in the bath.”

“She said very seriously that I must be good to you.”

“Isn’t she foolish, though? But you didn’t have to tell me.”

“Tell you? Why is it that you always seem so touchy when that girl is mentioned?”

“Would you like to have her?”

“See? What call is there for a remark like that?”

“I’m not joking. Whenever I look at her, I feel as though I have a heavy load and can’t get rid of it. Somehow I always feel that way. If you’re really fond of her, take a good look at her. You’ll see what I mean.” She laid her hand on his shoulder and leaned toward him. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “No, that’s not what I want. If she were to fall into the hands of someone like you, she might not go crazy after all. Why don’t you take my load for me?”

“You’re going a little too far.”

“You think I’m drunk and talking nonsense? I’m not. I would know she was being well taken care
of, and I could go pleasantly to seed here in the mountains. It would be a fine, quiet feeling.”

“That’s enough.”

“Just leave me alone.” In her flight, she ran into the closed door of the house she lived in.

“They’ve decided you’re not coming home.”

“But I can open it.” The door sounded old and dry as she lifted it from the groove and pushed it back.

“Come on in.”

“But think of the hour.”

“Everyone will be asleep.”

Shimamura hesitated.

“I’ll see you back to the inn, then.”

“I can go by myself.”

“But you haven’t seen my room.”

They stepped through the kitchen door, and the sleeping figures of the family lay sprawled before them. The thin mattresses on the floor were covered with cheap striped cloth, now faded, of the sort often used for “mountain trousers.” The mother and father and five or six children, the oldest a girl perhaps sixteen, lay under a scorched lampshade. Heads faced in every direction. There was drab poverty in the scene, and yet under it there lay an urgent, powerful vitality.

As if thrown back by the warm breath of all the sleepers, Shimamura started toward the door.
Komako noisily closed it in his face, however, and went in through the kitchen. She made no attempt to soften her footsteps. Shimamura followed stealthily past the children’s pillows, a strange thrill rising in his chest.

“Wait here. I’ll turn on the light upstairs.”

“It’s all right.” Shimamura climbed the stairs in the dark. As he looked back, he saw the candy shop beyond the homely sleeping faces.

The matting was worn in the four rustic rooms on the second floor.

“It’s a little large, I have to admit, for just one person.” The partitions between the rooms had been taken down, and Komako’s bedding lay small and solitary inside the sliding doors, their paper panels yellowed with age, that separated the rooms from the skirting corridor. Old furniture and tools, evidently the property of the family she lived with, were piled in the far room. Party kimonos hung from pegs along the wall. The whole suggested a fox’s or badger’s lair to Shimamura.

Komako sat down solidly in the slightly raised alcove and offered him the only cushion.

“Bright red.” She peered into the mirror. “Am I really so drunk?” She fumbled through the top drawer of the dresser. “Here. My diary.”

“As long as this, is it?”

She took up a small figured-paper box filled to the top with assorted cigarettes.

“I push them up my sleeve or inside my
obi
when a guest gives them to me, and some of them are a little smashed. They’re clean, though. I make up for wrinkles by having every variety to offer.” She stirred up the contents to demonstrate that he could have his choice.

“But I don’t have a match. I don’t need matches now that I’ve stopped smoking.”

“It’s all right. How is the sewing?”

“I try to work at it, but the guests for the maple leaves keep me busy.” She turned to put away the sewing that lay in front of the dresser.

The fine-grained chest of drawers and the expensive vermilion-lacquered sewing-box, relics perhaps of her years in Tokyo, were as they had been in the attic that so resembled an old paper box; but they seemed sadly out of place in these dilapidated second-floor rooms.

A thin string ran from Komako’s pillow to the ceiling.

“I turn the light out with this when I’m reading.” She tugged at the string. Gentle and subdued, the proper housewife again, she was not quite able even so to hide her discomposure.

“Lonely as the fox’s lady out at night, aren’t you.”

“I really am.”

“And do you mean to live here four years?”

“But it’s going on a year already. It won’t be long.”

Shimamura was nervous. He thought he could hear the breathing of the family below, and he had run out of things to talk about. He stood up to leave.

Komako slid the door half shut behind him. She glanced up at the sky. “It’s beginning to look like snow. The end of the maple leaves.” She recited a line of poetry
^‡
as she stepped outside: “Here in our mountains, the snow falls even on the maple leaves.”

“Well, good night.”

“Wait. I’ll see you back to the hotel. As far as the door, no farther.”

But she followed him inside.

“Go on to bed.” She slipped away, and a few minutes later she was back with two glasses filled to the brim with
saké
.

“Drink,” she ordered as she stepped into the room. “We’re going to have a drink.”

“But aren’t they asleep? Where did you find it?”

“I know where they keep it.” She had quite obviously had herself a drink as she poured from
the vat. The earlier drunkenness had come back. With narrowed eyes, she watched the
saké
spill over on her hand. “It’s no fun, though, swallowing the stuff down in the dark.”

Shimamura drank meekly from the cup that was thrust at him.

It was not usual for him to get drunk on so little; but perhaps he was chilled from the walk. He began to feel sick. His head was whirling, and he could almost see himself going pale. He closed his eyes and fell back on the quilt. Komako put her arms around him in alarm. A childlike feeling of security came to him from the warmth of her body.

She seemed ill at ease, like a young woman, still childless, who takes a baby up in her arms. She raised her head and looked down, as at the sleeping child.

“You’re a good girl.”

“Why? Why am I good? What’s good about me?”

“You’re a good girl.”

“Don’t tease me. It’s wrong of you.” She looked aside, and she spoke in broken phrases, like little blows, as she rocked him back and forth.

She laughed softly to herself.

“I’m not good at all. It’s not easy having you here. You’d best go home. Each time I come to
see you I want to put on a new kimono, and now I have none left. This one is borrowed. So you see I’m not really good at all.”

Shimamura did not answer.

“And what do you find good in me?” Her voice was a little husky. “The first day I met you I thought I had never seen anyone I disliked more. People just don’t say the sort of things you said. I hated you.”

Shimamura nodded.

“Oh? You understand then why I’ve not mentioned it before? When a woman has to say these things, she has gone as far as she can, you know.”

“But it’s all right.”

“Is it?” They were silent for some moments. Komako seemed to be looking back on herself, and the awareness of a woman’s being alive came to Shimamura in her warmth.

“You’re a good woman.”

“How am I good?”

“A good woman.”

“What an odd person.” Her face was hidden from him, as though she were rubbing her jaw against an itching shoulder. Then suddenly, Shimamura had no idea why, she raised herself angrily to an elbow.

“A good woman—what do you mean by that? What do you mean?”

He only stared at her.

“Admit it. That’s why you came to see me. You were laughing at me. You were laughing at me after all.”

She glared at him, scarlet with anger. Her shoulders were shaking. But the flush receded as quickly as it had come, and tears were falling over her blanched face.

“I hate you. How I hate you.” She rolled out of bed and sat with her back to him.

Shimamura felt a stabbing in his chest as he saw what the mistake had been. He lay silent, his eyes closed.

“It makes me very sad,” she murmured to herself. Her head was on her knees, and her body was bent into a tight ball.

When she had wept herself out, she sat jabbing at the floor mat with a silver hair-ornament. Presently she slipped from the room.

Shimamura could not bring himself to follow her. She had reason to feel hurt.

But soon she was back, her bare feet quiet in the corridor. “Are you going for a bath?” she called from outside the door. It was a high, thin little voice.

“If you want.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve reconsidered.”

She showed no sign of coming in. Shimamura
picked up his towel and stepped into the hall. She walked ahead of him with her eyes on the floor, like a criminal being led away. As the bath warmed her, however, she became strangely gay and winsome, and sleep was out of the question.

The next morning Shimamura awoke to a voice reciting a Nō play.

He lay for a time listening. Kamoko turned and smiled from the mirror.

“The guests in the Plum Room. I was called there after my first party. Remember?”

“A Nō club out on a trip?”

“Yes.”

“It snowed?”

“Yes.” She got up and threw open the sliding door in front of the window. “No more maple leaves.”

From the gray sky, framed by the window, the snow floated toward them in great flakes, like white peonies. There was something quietly unreal about it. Shimamura stared with the vacantness that comes from lack of sleep.

The Nō reciters had taken out a drum.

He remembered the snowy morning toward the end of the year before, and glanced at the mirror. The cold peonies floated up yet larger, cutting a
white outline around Komako. Her kimono was open at the neck, and she was wiping at her throat with a towel.

Her skin was as clean as if it had just been laundered. He had not dreamed that she was a woman who would find it necessary to take offense at such a trivial remark, and that very fact lent her an irresistible sadness.

The mountains, more distant each day as the russet of the autumn leaves had darkened, came brightly back to life with the snow.

The cedars, under a thin coating of snow, rose sheer from the white ground to the sky, each cut off sharply from the rest.

The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the snow, and bleached in the snow. Everything, from the first spinning of the thread to the last finishing touches, was done in the snow. “There is Chijimi linen because there is snow,” someone wrote long ago. “Snow is the mother of Chijimi.”

The Chijimi grass-linen of this snow country was the handwork of the mountain maiden through the long, snowbound winters. Shimamura searched for the cloth in old-clothes shops to use for summer kimonos. Through acquaintances in
the dance world, he had found a shop that specialized in old Nō robes, and he had a standing order that when a good piece of Chijimi came in he was to see it.

In the old days, it is said, the early Chijimi fair was held in the spring, when the snow had melted and the snow blinds were taken down from the houses. People came from far and near to buy Chijimi, even wholesalers from the great commercial cities, Edo, Nagoya, and Osaka; and the inns at which they stayed were fixed by tradition. Since the labors of half a year were on display, youths and maidens gathered from all the mountain villages. Sellers’ booths and buyers’ booths were lined up side by side, and the market took on the air of a festival. With prizes awarded for the best pieces of weaving, it came also to be sort of competition for husbands. The girls learned to weave as children, and they turned out their best work between the ages of perhaps fourteen and twenty-four. As they grew older they lost the touch that gave tone to the finest Chijimi. In their desire to be numbered among the few outstanding weavers, they put their whole labor and love into this product of the long snowbound months—the months of seclusion and boredom, between October, under the old lunar calender, when the spinning began, and mid-February of
the following year, when the last bleaching was finished.