Snow Country (6 page)

“It doesn’t matter if there is a sick man. No one ever comes to my room.” Komako went in through an opening in a low stone wall.

To the right was a small field, and to the left persimmon trees stood along the wall that marked off the neighboring plot. There seemed to be a flower garden in front of the house, and red carp were swimming in the little lotus pond. The ice had been broken away and lay piled along the bank. The house was old and decayed, like the pitted trunk of a persimmon. There were patches of snow on the roof, the rafters of which sagged to draw a wavy line at the eaves.

The air in the earthen-floored hallway was still and cold. Shimamura was led up a ladder before his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. It was a ladder in the truest sense of the word, and the room at the top was an attic.

“This is the room the silkworms used to live in. Are you surprised?”

“You’re lucky you’ve never fallen downstairs, drinking the way you do.”

“I have. But generally when I’ve had too much to drink I crawl into the
kotatsu
downstairs and go off to sleep.” She pushed her hand tentatively into the
kotatsu
, then went below for charcoal. Shimamura looked around at the curious room. Although there was but one low window, opening to the south, the freshly changed paper on the door turned off the rays of the sun brightly. The walls had been industriously pasted over with rice paper, so that the effect was rather like the inside of an old-fashioned paper box; but overhead was only the bare roof sloping down toward the window, as if a dark loneliness had settled itself over the room. Wondering what might be on the other side of the wall, Shimamura had the uneasy feeling that he was suspended in a void. But the walls and the floor, for all their shabbiness, were spotlessly clean.

For a moment he was taken with the fancy that the light must pass through Komako, living in the silkworms’ room, as it passed through the translucent silkworms.

The
kotatsu
was covered with a quilt of the same rough, striped cotton material as the standard “mountain trousers.” The chest of drawers was old, but the grain of the wood was fine and straight—perhaps it was a relic of Komako’s years in Tokyo. It was badly paired with a cheap dresser,
while the vermilion sewing-box gave off the luxurious glow of good lacquer. The boxes stacked along the wall behind a thin woolen curtain apparently served as bookshelves.

The kimono of the evening before hung on the wall, open to show the brilliant red under-kimono.

Komako came spryly up the ladder with a supply of charcoal.

“It’s from the sickroom. But you needn’t worry. They say fire spreads no germs.” Her newly dressed hair almost brushed the
kotatsu
as she stirred away at the coals. The music teacher’s son had intestinal tuberculosis, she said, and had come home to die.

But it was not entirely accurate to say that he had “come home.” He had as a matter of fact not been born here. This was his mother’s home. His mother had taught dancing down on the coast even when she was no longer a geisha, but she had had a stroke while she was still in her forties, and had come back to this hot spring to recover. The son, fond of machinery since he was a child, had stayed behind to work in a watch-shop. Presently he moved to Tokyo and started going to night school, and the strain was evidently too much for him. He was only twenty-five.

All this Komako told him with no hesitation, but she said nothing about the girl who had
brought the man home, and nothing about why she herself was in this house.

Shimamura felt most uncomfortable at what she did say, however. Suspended there in the void, she seemed to be broadcasting to the four directions.

As he stepped from the hallway, he saw something faintly white through the corner of his eye. It was a samisen box, and it struck him as larger and longer than it should be. He found it hard to imagine her carrying so unwieldy an object to parties. The darkened door inside the hallway slid open.

“Do you mind if I step over this, Komako?” It was that clear voice, so beautiful that it was almost sad. Shimamura waited for an echo to come back.

It was Yoko’s voice, the voice that had called out over the snow to the station master the night before.

“No, please go ahead.” Yoko stepped lightly over the samisen box, a glass chamber-pot in her hand.

It was clear, from the familiar way she had talked to the station master the evening before and from the way she wore “mountain trousers,” that she was a native of this snow country, but the bold pattern of her
obi
, half visible over the trousers, made the rough russet and black stripes of the latter seem fresh and cheerful, and for the same
reason the long sleeves of her woolen kimono took on a certain voluptuous charm. The trousers, split just below the knees, filled out toward the hips, and the heavy cotton, for all its natural stiffness, was somehow supple and gentle.

Yoko darted one quick, piercing glance at Shimamura and went silently out over the earthen floor.

Even when he had left the house, Shimamura was haunted by that glance, burning just in front of his forehead. It was cold as a very distant light, for the inexpressible beauty of it had made his heart rise when, the night before, that light off in the mountains had passed across the girl’s face in the train window and lighted her eye for a moment. The impression came back to Shimamura, and with it the memory of the mirror filled with snow, and Komako’s red cheeks floating in the middle of it.

He walked faster. His legs were round and plump, but he was seized with a certain abandon as he walked along gazing at the mountains he was so fond of, and his pace quickened, though he hardly knew it. Always ready to give himself up to reverie, he could not believe that the mirror floating over the evening scenery and the other snowy mirror were really works of man. They were part of nature, and part of some distant world.

And the room he had only this moment left had become part of that same distant world.

Startled at himself, in need of something to cling to, he stopped a blind masseuse at the top of the hill.

“Could you give me a massage?”

“Let me see. What time will it be?” She tucked her cane under her arm and, taking a covered pocket watch from her
obi
, felt at the face with her left hand. “Two thirty-five. I have an appointment over beyond the station at three-thirty. But I suppose it won’t matter if I’m a little late.”

“You’re very clever to be able to tell the time.”

“It has no glass, and I can feel the hands.”

“You can feel the figures?”

“Not the figures.” She took the watch out again, a silver one, large for a woman, and flicked open the lid. She laid her fingers across the face with one at twelve and one at six, and a third halfway between at three. “I can tell the time fairly well. I may be a minute off one way or the other, but I never miss by as much as two minutes.”

“You don’t find the road a little slippery?”

“When it rains my daughter comes to call for me. At night I take care of the people in the village, and never come up this far. The maids at the inn are always joking and saying its because my husband won’t let me go out at night.”

“Your children are growing up?”

“The oldest girl is twelve.” They had reached Shimamura’s room, and they were silent for a time as the massaging began. The sound of a samisen came to them from the distance.

“Who would that be, I wonder.”

“You can always tell which geisha it is by the tone?”

“I can tell some of them. Some I can’t. You must not have to work. Feel how nice and soft you are.”

“No stiff muscles on me.”

“A little stiff here at the base of the neck. But you’re just right, not too fat and not too thin. And you don’t drink, do you?”

“You can tell that?”

“I have three other customers with physiques exactly like yours.”

“A common sort of physique.”

“But when you don’t drink, you don’t know what it is really to enjoy yourself—to forget everything that happens.”

“Your husband drinks, does he?”

“Much too much.”

“But whoever it is, she’s not much of a musician.”

“Very poor indeed.”

“Do you play yourself?”

“I did when I was young. From the time I was
eight till I was nineteen. I haven’t played in fifteen years now. Not since I was married.”

Did all blind people look younger than they were? Shimamura wondered.

“But if you learn when you’re young, you never forget.”

“My hands have changed from doing this sort of work, but my ear is still good. It makes me very impatient to hear them playing. But then I suppose I felt impatient at my own playing when I was young.” She listened for a time. “Fumi at the Izutsuya, maybe. The best ones and the worst are the easiest to tell.”

“There are good ones?”

“Komako is very good. She’s young, but she’s improved a great deal lately.”

“Really?”

“You know her, don’t you? I say she’s good, but you have to remember that our standards here in the mountains are not very high.”

“I don’t really know her. I was on the train with the music teacher’s son last night, though.”

“He’s well again?”

“Apparently not.”

“Oh? He’s been sick for a long time in Tokyo, and they say it was to help pay the doctors’ bills that Komako became a geisha last summer. I wonder if it did any good.”

“Komako, you say?”

“They were only engaged. But I suppose you feel better afterwards if you’ve done everything you can.”

“She was engaged to him?”

“So they say. I don’t really know, but that’s the rumor.”

It was almost too ordinary a thing to hear gossip about geisha from the hot-spring masseuse, and that fact had the perverse effect of making the news the more startling; and Komako’s having become a geisha to help her fiancé was so ordinary a bit of melodrama that he found himself almost refusing to accept it. Perhaps certain moral considerations—questions of the propriety of selling oneself as a geisha—helped the refusal.

Shimamura was beginning to think he would like to go deeper into the story, but the masseuse was silent.

If Komako was the man’s fiancée, and Yoko was his new lover, and the man was going to die—the expression “wasted effort” again came into Shimamura’s mind. For Komako thus to guard her promise to the end, for her even to sell herself to pay doctors’ bills—what was it if not wasted effort?

He would accost her with this fact, he would drive it home, when he saw her again, he said to himself; and yet her existence seemed to have become
purer and cleaner for this new bit of knowledge.

Aware of a shameful danger lurking in his numbed sense of the false and empty, he lay concentrating on it, trying to feel it, for some time after the masseuse left. He was chilled to the pit of his stomach—but someone had left the windows wide open.

The color of evening had already fallen on the mountain valley, early buried in shadows. Out of the dusk the distant mountains, still reflecting the light of the evening sun, seemed to have come much nearer.

Presently, as the mountain chasms were far and near, high and low, the shadows in them began to deepen, and the sky was red over the snowy mountains, bathed now in but a wan light.

Cedar groves stood out darkly by the river bank, at the ski ground, around the shrine.

Like a warm light, Komako poured in on the empty wretchedness that had assailed Shimamura.

There was a meeting at the inn to discuss plans for the ski season. She had been called in for the party afterwards. She put her hands into the
kotatsu
, then quickly reached up and stroked Shimamura’s cheek.

“You’re pale this evening. Very strange.” She clutched at the soft flesh of his cheek as if to
tear it away. “Aren’t you the foolish one, though.”

She already seemed a little drunk. When she came back from the party she collapsed before the mirror, and drunkenness came out on her face to almost comic effect. “I know nothing about it. Nothing. My head aches. I feel terrible. Terrible. I want a drink. Give me water.”

She pressed both hands to her face and tumbled over with little concern for her carefully dressed hair. Presently she brought herself up again and began cleaning away the thick powder with cold cream. The face underneath was a brilliant red. She was quite delighted with herself. To Shimamura it was astonishing that drunkenness could pass so quickly. Her shoulders were shaking from the cold.

All through August she had been near nervous collapse, she told him quietly.

“I thought I’d go mad. I kept brooding over something, and I didn’t know myself what it was. It was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep. I kept myself under control only when I went out to a party. I had all sorts of dreams, and I lost my appetite. I would sit there jabbing at the floor for hours on end, all through the hottest part of the day.”

“When did you first go out as a geisha?”

“In June. I thought for a while I might go to Hamamatsu.”

“Get married?”

She nodded. The man had been after her to marry him, but she couldn’t like him. She had had great trouble deciding what to do.

“But if you didn’t like him, what were you so undecided about?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Marriage has so much charm?”

“Don’t be nasty. It’s more that I want to have everything around me tidy and in order.”

Shimamura grunted.

“You’re not a very satisfying person, you know.”

“Was there something between you and the man from Hamamatsu?”

She flung out her answer: “If there had been, do you think I would have hesitated? But he said that as long as I stayed here, he wouldn’t let me marry anyone else. He said he would do everything possible to stand in the way.”

“But what could he do from as far away as Hamamatsu? You worried about that?”

Komako stretched out for a time, enjoying the warmth of her body. When she spoke again, her tone was quite casual. “I thought I was pregnant.” She giggled. “It seems ridiculous when I look back on it now.”