Snow Country (4 page)

When he was pleasantly tired, he turned sharply around and, tucking the skirts of his kimono into his
obi
, ran headlong back down the slope. Two yellow butterflies flew up at his feet.

The butterflies, weaving in and out, climbed higher than the line of the Border Range, their yellow turning to white in the distance.

“What happened?” The woman was standing in the shade of the cedar trees. “You must have been very happy, the way you were laughing.”

“I gave it up.” Shimamura felt the same senseless laugh rising again. “I gave it up.”

“Oh?” She turned and walked slowly into the grove. Shimamura followed in silence.

It was a shrine grove. The woman sat down on a flat rock beside the moss-covered shrine dogs.

“It’s always cool here. Even in the middle of the summer there’s a cool wind.”

“Are all the geisha like that?”

“They’re all a little like her, I suppose. Some of the older ones are very attractive, if you had wanted one of them.” Her eyes were on the ground, and she spoke coldly. The dusky green of the cedars seemed to reflect from her neck.

Shimamura looked up at the cedar branches. “It’s all over. My strength left me—really, it seems very funny.”

From behind the rock, the cedars threw up their trunks in perfectly straight lines, so high that he could see the tops only by arching his back. The dark needles blocked out the sky, and the stillness seemed to be singing quietly. The trunk against which Shimamura leaned was the oldest of all. For some reason all the branches on the north side had withered, and, their tips broken and fallen, they looked like stakes driven into the trunk with their sharp ends but, to make a terrible weapon for some god.

“I made a mistake. I saw you as soon as I came down from the mountains, and I let myself think
that all the geisha here were like you,” he laughed. It occurred to him now that the thought of washing away in such short order the vigor of seven days in the mountains had perhaps first come to him when he saw the cleanness of this woman.

She gazed down at the river, distant in the afternoon sun. Shimamura was a little unsure of himself.

“I forgot,” she suddenly remarked, with forced lightness. “I brought your tobacco. I went back up to your room a little while ago and found that you had gone out. I wondered where you could be, and then I saw you running up the mountain for all you were worth. I watched from the window. You were very funny. But you forgot your tobacco. Here.”

She took the tobacco from her kimono sleeve and lighted a match for him.

“I wasn’t very nice to that poor girl.”

“But it’s up to the guest, after all, when he wants to let the geisha go.”

Through the quiet, the sound of the rocky river came up to them with a rounded softness. Shadows were darkening in the mountain chasms on the other side of the valley, framed in the cedar branches.

“Unless she were as good as you, I’d feel cheated when I saw you afterwards.”

“Don’t talk to me about it. You’re just unwilling to admit you lost, that’s all.” There was scorn in
her voice, and yet an affection of quite a new sort flowed between them.

As it became clear to Shimamura that he had from the start wanted only this woman, and that he had taken his usual roundabout way of saying so, he began to see himself as rather repulsive and the woman as all the more beautiful. Something from that cool figure had swept through him after she called to him from under the cedars.

The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches. Even when she was silent her lips seemed always to be moving. Had they had wrinkles or cracks, or had their color been less fresh, they would have struck one as unwholesome, but they were never anything but smooth and shining. The line of her eyelids neither rose nor fell. As if for some special reason, it drew its way straight across her face. There was something faintly comical about the effect, but the short, thick hair of her eyebrows sloped gently down to enfold the line discreetly. There was nothing remarkable about the outlines of her round, slightly aquiline face. With her skin like white porcelain coated over a faint pink, and her throat still girlish, not yet filled out, the impression she gave was above all one of cleanness, not quite one of real beauty.

Her breasts were rather full for a woman used to the high, binding
obi
of the geisha.

“The sand flies have come out,” she said, standing up and brushing at the skirt of her kimono.

Alone in the quiet, they could think of little to say.

It was perhaps ten o’clock that night. The woman called loudly to Shimamura from the hall, and a moment later she fell into his room as if someone had thrown her. She collapsed in front of the table. Flailing with a drunken arm at everything that happened to be on it, she poured herself a glass of water and drank in great gulps.

She had gone out to meet some travelers down from the mountains that evening, men she had been friendly with during the skiing season the winter before. They had invited her to the inn, whereupon they had had a riotous party, complete with geisha, and had proceeded to get her drunk.

Her head waved uncertainly, and she seemed prepared to talk on forever. Presently she remembered herself. “I shouldn’t be here. I’ll come again. They’ll be looking for me. I’ll come again later.” She staggered from the room.

An hour or so later, he heard uneven steps coming down the long hall. She was weaving from side
to side, he could tell, running into a wall, stumbling to the floor.

“Shimamura, Shimamura,” she called in a high voice. “I can’t see. Shimamura!”

It was, with no attempt at covering itself, the naked heart of a woman calling out to her man. Shimamura was startled. That high, piercing voice must surely be echoing all through the inn. He got up hastily. Pushing her fingers through the paper panel, the woman clutched at the frame of the door, and fell heavily against him.

“You’re here.” Clinging to him, she sank to the floor. She leaned against him as she spoke. “I’m not drunk. Who says I’m drunk? Ah, it hurts, it hurts. It’s just that it hurts. I know exactly what I’m doing. Give me water, I want water. I mixed my drinks, that was my mistake. That’s what goes to your head. It hurts. They had a bottle of cheap whisky. How was I to know it was cheap?” She rubbed her forehead with her fists.

The sound of the rain outside was suddenly louder.

Each time he relaxed his embrace even a little, she threatened to collapse. His arm was around her neck so tight that her hair was rumpled against his cheek. He thrust a hand inside the neck of her kimono.

He added coaxing words, but she did not answer. She folded her arms like a bar over the breast he was asking for.

“What’s the matter with you.” She bit savagely at her arm, as though angered by its refusal to serve her. “Damn you, damn you. Lazy, useless. What’s the matter with you.”

Shimamura drew back startled. There were deep teeth-marks on her arm.

She no longer resisted, however. Giving herself up to his hands, she began writing something with the tip of her finger. She would tell him the people she liked, she said. After she had written the names of some twenty or thirty actors, she wrote “Shimamura, Shimamura,” over and over again.

The delicious swelling under Shimamura’s hand grew warmer.

“Everything is all right.” His voice was serene. “Everything is all right again.” He sensed something a little motherly in her.

But the headache came back. She writhed and twisted, and sank to the floor in a corner of the room.

“It won’t do. It won’t do. I’m going home. Going home.”

“Do you think you can walk that far? And listen to the rain.”

“I’ll go home barefoot. I’ll crawl home.”

“You don’t think that’s a little dangerous? If you have to go, I’ll take you.”

The inn was on a hill, and the road was a steep one.

“Suppose you try loosening your clothes. Lie down for a little while and you’ll feel well enough to go.”

“No, no. This is the way. I’m used to it.” She sat up straight and took a deep breath, but breathing was clearly painful. She felt a little nauseated, she said, and opened the window behind her, but she could not vomit. She seemed to be holding back the urge to fall down writhing on the floor. Now and then she came to herself. “I’m going home, I’m going home,” she said again and again, and presently it was after two.

“Go on to bed. Go on to bed when a person tells you to.”

“But what will you do?” Shimamura asked.

“I’ll just sit here like this. When I feel a little better I’ll go home. I’ll go home before daylight.” She crawled over on her knees and tugged at him. “Go on to sleep. Pay no attention to me, I tell you.”

Shimamura went back to bed. The woman sprawled over the table and took another drink of water.

“Get up. Get up when a person tells you to.”

“Which do you want me to do?”

“All right, go to sleep.”

“You aren’t making much sense, you know.” He pulled her into bed after him.

Her face was turned half away, hidden from him, but after a time she thrust her lips violently toward him.

Then, as if in a delirium she were trying to tell of her pain, she repeated over and over, he did not know how many times: “No, no. Didn’t you say you wanted to be friends?”

The almost too serious tone of it rather dulled his ardor, and as he saw her wrinkle her forehead in the effort to control herself, he thought of standing by the commitment he had made.

But then she said: “I won’t have any regrets. I’ll never have any regrets. But I’m not that sort of woman. It can’t last. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

She was still half numb from the liquor.

“It’s not my fault. It’s yours. You lost. You’re the weak one. Not I.” She ran on almost in a trance, and she bit at her sleeve as if to fight back the happiness.

She was quiet for a time, apparently drained of feeling. Then, as if the thought came to her from somewhere in her memory, she struck out: “You’re laughing, aren’t you? You’re laughing at me.”

“I am not.”

“Deep in your heart you’re laughing at me. Even if you aren’t now, you will be later.” She was choked with tears. Turning away from him, she buried her face in her hands.

But a moment later she was calm again. Soft and yielding as if she were offering herself up, she was suddenly very intimate, and she began telling him all about herself. She seemed quite to have forgotten the headache. She said not a word about what had just happened.

“But I’ve been so busy talking I haven’t noticed how late it is.” She smiled a little bashfully. She had to leave before daylight, she said. “It’s still dark. But people here get up early.” Time after time she got up to look out the window. “They won’t be able to see my face yet. And it’s raining. No one will be going out to the fields this morning.”

She seemed reluctant to go even when the lines of the mountain and of the roofs on its slopes were floating out of the rain. Finally it was time for the hotel maids to be up and about. She retouched her hair and ran, almost fled, from the room, brushing aside Shimamura’s offer to see her to the door. Someone might catch a glimpse of the two of them together.

Shimamura went back to Tokyo that day.

• • •

“You remember what you said then? But you were wrong. Why else would anyone come to such a place in December? I wasn’t laughing at you.”

The woman raised her head. Her face where it had been pressed against Shimamura’s hand was red under the thick powder, from the eye across the bridge of the nose. It made him think of the snow-country cold, and yet, because of the darkness of her hair, there was a certain warmth in it.

She smiled quietly, as though dazzled by a bright light. Perhaps, as she smiled, she thought of “then,” and Shimamura’s words gradually colored her whole body. When she bowed her head, a little stiffly, he could see that even her back under her kimono was flushed a deep red. Set off by the color of her hair, the moist sensuous skin was as if laid naked before him. Her hair could not really have been called thick. Stiff like a man’s, and swept up into a high Japanese-style coiffure with not a hair out of place, it glowed like some heavy black stone.

Shimamura looked at the hair and wondered whether the coldness that had so startled him—he had never touched such cold hair, he said—might be less the cold of the snow-country winter than something in the hair itself. The woman began counting on her fingers. For some time she counted on.

“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.”