Snow Country (8 page)

It did not snow that evening. A hailstorm turned to rain.

Shimamura called Komako again the night before he was to leave. It was a clear, moonlit night. At eleven o’clock the air was bitterly cold, but Komako insisted on going for a walk. She pulled him roughly from the
kotatsu
.

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her
obi
. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.

“We’ll go to the station,” said Komako.

“You’re insane. It’s more than a mile each way.”

“You’ll be going back to Tokyo soon. We’ll go look at the station.”

Shimamura was numb from his shoulders to his thighs.

Back in his room, Komako sank disconsolately to the floor. Her head was bowed and her arms were deep in the
kotatsu
. Strangely, she refused to go with him to the bath.

Bedding had been laid out with the foot of the mattress inside the
kotatsu
. Komako was sitting forlornly beside it when Shimamura came back from the bath. She said nothing.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m going home.”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“Go on to bed. Just let me sit here for a little while.”

“Why do you want to go home?”

“I’m not going home. I’ll sit here till morning.”

“Don’t be difficult.”

“I’m not being difficult. I’m not being difficult.”

“Then …?”

“I … don’t feel well.”

“Is that all?” Shimamura laughed. “I’ll leave you quite to yourself.”

“No.”

“And why did you have to go out and run all over town?”

“I’m going home.”

“There’s no need to go home.”

“But it’s not easy for me. Go on back to Tokyo. It’s no easy for me.” Her face was low over the
kotatsu
.

Was it sorrow at finding herself about to sink into too deep a relationship with a traveler? Or at having to keep herself under control at so dear a moment? She has come that far, then, Shimamura said to himself. He too was silent for a time.

“Please go back to Tokyo.”

“As a matter of fact, I was thinking of going back tomorrow.”

“No! Why are you going back?” She looked up, startled, as though aroused from sleep.

“What can I do for you, no matter how long I stay?”

She gazed at him for a moment, then burst out violently: “You don’t have to say that. What reason have you to say that?” She stood up irritably, and threw herself at his neck. “It’s wrong of you to say such things. Get up. Get up, I tell you.” The words poured out deliriously, and she fell down beside him, quite forgetting in her derangement the physical difficulty she had spoken of earlier.

Some time later, she opened warm, moist eyes.

She picked up the hair ornament that had fallen to the floor.

“You really must go back tomorrow,” she said quietly.

As Shimamura was changing clothes to leave on the three-o’clock train the next afternoon, the manager of the inn beckoned Komako into the hall. “Let’s see. Suppose we make it about eleven hours,” he could hear Komako’s answer. They were evidently discussing the bill for her services as a geisha, and the manager perhaps thought it would be unreasonable to charge for the whole sixteen or seventeen hours.

The bill as a matter of fact was computed by the hour—“Left at five,” or “Left at twelve”—without the usual charge for overnight services.

Komako, in an overcoat and a white scarf, saw him to the station.

Even when he had finished buying presents to take back to Tokyo, he had some twenty minutes to kill. Walking with Komako in the slightly raised station plaza, he thought what a narrow little valley it was, crowded in among the snowy mountains. Komako’s too-black hair was a little touching, a little sad, in the loneliness of the shadowed mountain pocket.

The sun shone dimly on a spot in the mountains far down the river.

“It’s melted a good deal since I came.”

“Two days of snow, though, and we’ll have six feet. Then it snows again, and before long the lights on those poles are out of sight. I’ll walk along thinking of you, and I’ll find myself strung up on a wire.”

“The snow is that deep?”

“They say that in the next town up the line the schoolchildren jump naked from the second floor of the dormitory. They sink out of sight in the snow, and they move around under it as though they were swimming. Look, a snowplow.”

“I’d like to see it that deep. But I suppose the inn will be crowded. And there might be danger of slides along the way.”

“With you it’s not a question of money, is it?
Have you always had so much to spend?” She turned to look up at his face. “Why don’t you grow a mustache?”

“I’ve thought of it.” Shimamura, freshly shaven, stroked the blue-black traces of his beard. A deep line from the corner of his mouth set off the softness of his cheek. Was that, he wondered, what Komako found attractive? “You always look a little as though you’d just shaved too when you take off that powder.”

“Listen! The crows. That frightening way they sometimes have. Where are they, I wonder? And isn’t it cold!” Komako hugged herself as she looked up at the sky.

“Shall we go in by the stove?”

A figure in “mountain trousers” came running up the wide road from the main highway into the station plaza. It was Yoko.

“Komako. Yukio—Komako,” she panted, clinging to Komako like a child that has run frightened to its mother, “come home. Right away. Yukio’s worse. Right away.”

Komako closed her eyes, as if from the pain of the assault on her shoulder. Her face was white, but she shook her head with surprising firmness.

“I can’t go home. I’m seeing off a guest.”

Shimamura was startled. “You needn’t see me off.”

“It’s not right to leave. How do I know you’ll come again?”

“I’ll come, I’ll come.”

Yoko seemed not to hear the exchange. “I just called the inn,” she went on feverishly, “and they said you were at the station. So I came here. I ran all the way. Yukio is asking for you.” She pulled at Komako, but Komako shook her off impatiently.

“Leave me alone.”

It was Komako who reeled back, however. She retched violently, but nothing came from her mouth. The rims of her eyes were moist. There was goose flesh on her cheeks.

Yoko stood rigid, gazing at Komako. Her face, like a mask, wore an expression of such utter earnestness that it was impossible to tell whether she was angry or surprised or grieved. It seemed an extraordinarily pure and simple face to Shimamura.

She turned quickly and, without the slightest change of expression, clutched at Shimamura’s hand. “I’m sorry, but would you let her go home?” A tense, high-pitched voice assailed him. “Let her go home.”

“Of course I’ll let her go home. Go on home,” he called out to Komako. “Don’t be a fool.”

“And what say do you have in the matter?” Komako pushed Yoko roughly away from him.

Shimamura tried to signal the taxi waiting in front of the station. Yoko clutched at his arm so tightly that his fingers were numbed. “I’ll send her home in a taxi,” he said. “Why don’t you go on ahead? People will be watching us.”

Yoko nodded quickly, and turned away with almost unbelievable alacrity. Why was the girl always so earnest, so sober, Shimamura wondered. But such musings did not seem entirely in keeping with the occasion.

That voice, so beautiful it was almost lonely, lingered in Shimamura’s ears as if it were echoing back from somewhere in the snowy mountains.

“Where are you going?” Komako pulled at Shimamura. He had signaled the taxi and was walking toward it. “I won’t. I’m not going home.”

For an instant Shimamura felt something very near physical revulsion.

“I don’t know what there is among the three of you, but the man may be dying even now. She came for you, didn’t she, because he wants to see you. Go home like a good girl. You’ll regret it all your life if you don’t. What if he dies even while you’re standing here? Don’t be stubborn. Forgive and forget.”

“Forgive and forget? You don’t understand. You don’t understand at all.”

“And when they sent you to Tokyo, he was the
only one who saw you off, didn’t you say? Do you think it’s right not to say good-by to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of the very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.”

“But I don’t want to. I don’t want to see a man die.”

It could have been the coldest heartlessness or too warm a passion—Shimamura did not know which.

“I’ll not be able to write in my diary any more. I’ll burn it,” she said softly, almost to herself. Her cheeks were flushed. “You’re a good, simple person at heart, aren’t you? If you really are, I won’t mind sending my whole diary to you. You won’t laugh at me? You’re a good, honest person at heart, I’m sure.”

Shimamura was moved by a wave of feeling he could not define himself. He thought he must indeed be the plainest, most honest person in the world. He no longer worried about sending Komako home. She said nothing more.

A porter from the inn came to tell them that the gate to the tracks was open.

Four or five villagers in somber winter dress got on and off the train.

“I’ll not go to the platform with you. Good-by.” Komako stood inside the closed window of the
waiting-room. From the train window it was as though one strange piece of fruit had been left behind in the grimy glass case of a shabby mountain grocery.

The window of the waiting-room was clear for an instant as the train started to move. Komako’s face glowed forth, and as quickly disappeared. It was the bright red it had been in the mirror that snowy morning, and for Shimamura that color again seemed to be the point at which he parted with reality.

The train climbed the north slope of the Border Range into the long tunnel. On the far side it moved down a mountain valley. The color of evening was descending from chasms between the peaks. The dim brightness of the winter afternoon seemed to have been sucked into the earth, and the battered old train had shed its bright shell in the tunnel. There was no snow on the south slope.

Following a stream, the train came out on the plain. A mountain, cut at the top in curious notches and spires, fell off in a graceful sweep to the far skirts. Over it the moon was rising. The solid, integral shape of the mountain, taking up the whole of the evening landscape there at the end of the plain, was set off in a deep purple against the pale light of the sky. The moon was no longer an afternoon white, but, faintly colored, it had not yet taken on
the clear coldness of the winter night. There was not a bird in the sky. Nothing broke the lines of the wide skirts to the right and the left. Where the mountain swept down to meet the river, a stark white building, a hydroelectric plant perhaps, stood out sharply from the withered scene the train window framed, one last spot saved from the night.

The window began to steam over. The landscape outside was dusky, and the figures of the passengers floated up half-transparent. It was the play of that evening mirror again. The train, probably no more than three or four worn-out, faded, old-fashioned coaches strung together, was not from the same world as the trains one finds on the main lines. The light inside was dim.

Shimamura abandoned himself to the fancy that he had stepped into some unreal conveyance, that he was being borne away in emptiness, cut off from time and place. The monotonous sound of the wheels became the woman’s voice.

Her words, though short and broken, were a sign that she was alive in all her vital intensity, and he knew he had not forgotten her from the fact that listening was a trial. But to the Shimamura of that moment, moving away from the woman, the voice was already a distant one that could do no more than sharpen the poignancy of travel.

Would Yukio be breathing his last even now? Komako had for reasons of her own refused to go home; and had she then failed to reach his bedside in time?

There were so few passengers that Shimamura felt a little uneasy.

Besides Shimamura himself, there were only a man, probably in his fifties, and opposite him a red-faced girl. A black shawl was thrown over the full flesh of her shoulders, and her cheeks were a wonderful, fiery red. She leaned slightly forward to catch every word the man said, and she answered him happily. A pair off on a long journey together, Shimamura concluded.

As the train pulled into a station behind which rose the chimneys of spinning-factories, however, the man hastily got up, took a wicker trunk from the baggage rack, and threw it out the window to the platform. “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime,” he called back to the girl as he hurried from the train.

Shimamura suddenly wanted to weep. He had been caught quite off guard, and it struck him afresh that he had said good-bye to the woman and was on his way home.

He had not considered the possibility that the two had simply met on the train. The man was perhaps a traveling salesman.

*
A charcoal brazier covered by a wooden frame and a quilt. Although it warms little more than the hands and feet, the
kotatsu
is the only heating device in the ordinary Japanese house.

†
The sash with which a kimono is tied. A woman’s
obi
is wide and stiff, a man’s narrower and usually softer.

PART TWO

I
T WAS
the egg-laying season for moths, Shimamura’s wife told him as he left Tokyo, and he was not to leave his clothes hanging in the open. There were indeed moths at the inn. Five or six large corn-colored moths clung to the decorative lantern under the eaves, and in the little dressing-room was a moth whose body was large out of all proportion to its wings.

The windows were still screened from the summer. A moth so still that it might have been glued there clung to one of the screens. Its feelers stood
out like delicate wool, the color of cedar bark, and its wings, the length of a woman’s finger, were a pale, almost diaphanous green. The ranges of mountains beyond were already autumn-red in the evening sun. That one spot of pale green struck him as oddly like the color of death. The fore and after wings overlapped to make a deeper green, and the wings fluttered like thin pieces of paper in the autumn wind.