Snow Country (9 page)

Wondering if the moth was alive, Shimamura went over to the window and rubbed his finger over the inside of the screen. The moth did not move. He struck at it with his fist, and it fell like a leaf from a tree, floating lightly up midway to the ground.

In front of the cedar grove opposite, dragonflies were bobbing about in countless swarms, like dandelion floss in the wind.

The river seemed to flow from the tips of the cedar branches.

He thought he would never tire of looking at the autumn flowers that spread a blanket of silver up the side of the mountain.

A White-Russian woman, a peddler, was sitting in the hallway when he came out of the bath. So you find them even in these mountains—He went for a closer look.

She appeared to be in her forties. Her face was
wrinkled and dirty, but her skin, where it showed at the full throat and beyond, was a pure, glowing white.

“Where are you from?” Shimamura asked.

“Where am I from? Where am I from?” The woman seemed troubled for an answer. She began to put away her wares, the most ordinary Japanese cosmetics and hair ornaments.

Her skirt, like a dirty sheet wrapped around her, had quite lost the feel of occidental dress, and had taken on instead something of the air of Japan. She carried her wares on her back in a large Japanese-style kerchief. But for all that, she still wore foreign shoes.

The innkeeper’s wife stood beside Shimamura watching the Russian leave. The two of them went into the office, where a large woman was seated at the hearth with her back to them. She took her long skirts in her hand as she stood up to go. Her cloak was a formal black.

She was a geisha Shimamura remembered having seen with Komako in an advertising photograph, the two of them on skis with cotton “mountain trousers” pulled over party kimonos. She seemed to be well along in years, plump and to all appearances good-natured.

The innkeeper was warming thick, oblong cakes over the embers.

“Won’t you have one?” he asked Shimamura. “You really must have one. The geisha you saw brought them to celebrate the end of her term.”

“She’s leaving, is she?”

“Yes.”

“She looks like a good sort.”

“She was very popular. Today she’s going the rounds to say good-by.”

Shimamura blew on the cake and bit into it. The hard crust, a little sour, gave off a musty smell.

Outside the window, the bright red of ripe persimmons was bathed in the evening sun. It seemed to send out a red glow even to the bamboo of the pothook over the hearth.

“See how long they are.” Shimamura looked out in astonishment at the steep path, down which old women were trudging with bundles of autumn grass on their backs. The grass looked to be twice the height of the women, and the tassels were long and powerful.

“It’s
kaya
grass.”

“
Kaya
, is it?”

“The government railways built a sort of restroom, I suppose you would call it, for their hot-spring exhibit, and they thatched the teahouse with
kaya
from these mountains. Someone in Tokyo bought it exactly as it was.”

“
Kaya
, is it,” Shimamura repeated, half to himself. “It’s
kaya
then on the mountain? I thought it must be a flower of some sort.”

The first thing that had struck Shimamura’s eye as he got off the train was that array of silver-white. High up the mountain, the
kaya
spread out silver in the sun, like the autumn sunlight itself pouring over the face of the mountain. Ah, I am here, something in Shimamura called out as he looked up at it.

But the great strands he saw here seemed quite different in nature from the grasses that had so moved him. The large bundles hid the women carrying them, and rustled against the rocks that flanked the path. And the plumes were long and powerful.

Under the dim light in the dressing-room, Shimamura could see that the large-bodied moth was laying eggs along the black lacquer of the clothes-frame. Moths were beating at the lantern under the eaves.

There was a steady humming of autumn insects, as there had been from before sundown.

Komako was a little late.

She gazed in at him from the hall.

“Why have you come here? Why have you come to a place like this?”

“I’ve come to see you.”

“You don’t mean that. I dislike people from Tokyo because they’re always lying.” She sat down, and her voice was softer. “I’m never going to see anyone off again. I can’t describe how it felt to see you off.”

“This time I’ll go without telling you.”

“No. I mean I won’t go to the station again.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died, of course.”

“While you were seeing me off?”

“But that’s not the reason. I had no idea I could hate so to see someone off.”

Shimamura nodded.

“Where were you on the fourteenth of February? I was waiting for you. But I’ll know better than to believe you next time.”

The fourteenth of February was the “bird-chasing festival,” a children’s festival that had in it the spirit of this snow country. For ten days before the festival the children of the village tramped down the snow with straw boots, and presently, cutting the now boardlike snow into two-foot cubes, they built a snow palace some six yards square and more than ten feet high. Since the New Year was celebrated here early in February, the traditional straw ropes were still strung up over the village doorways. On the fourteenth the children gathered the ropes and burned them in a red bonfire
before the snow palace. They pushed and jostled one another on the roof and sang the bird-chasing song, and afterwards, setting out lights, they spent the night in the palace. At dawn on the fifteenth they again climbed to the roof to sing the bird-chasing song.

It was then that the snow was deepest, and Shimamura had told Komako he would come for the festival.

“I was at home in February. I took a vacation. I was sure you would be here on the fourteenth, and I came back especially. I could have stayed to take care of her longer if I had known.”

“Was someone ill?”

“The music teacher. She had pneumonia down on the coast. The telegram came when I was at home, and I went down to take care of her.”

“Did she get better?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.” Shimamura’s words could have been either an expression of sympathy or an apology for the broken promise.

Komako shook her head mildly, and wiped at the table with her handkerchief. “The place is alive with insects.” A swarm of tiny winged insects fell from the table to the floor. Several small moths were circling the light.

Moths, how many kinds he could not tell,
dotted the screen, floating on the clear moonlight.

“My stomach aches.” Komako thrust both hands tight inside her
obi
, and her head fell to Shimamura’s knee. “My stomach aches.”

Insects smaller than moths gathered on the thick white powder at her neck. Some of them died there as Shimamura watched.

The flesh on her neck and shoulders was richer than it had been the year before. She is just twenty, he told himself.

He felt something warm and damp on his knee.

“ ‘Komako, go on up and look in the Camellia Room,’ they said in the office, very pleased with themselves. I don’t like that way they have. I’d been to see Kikuyu off, and I was just ready for a good nap when someone said there had been a call from here. I didn’t feel like coming. I had too much to drink last night at Kikuyu’s farewell party. They only laughed down in the office and wouldn’t tell me who was here. And it was you. It’s been a whole year. You’re the sort that comes only once a year?”

“I had one of the cakes she left.”

“You did?” Komako sat up. Her face was red where it had been pressed against his knee. She seemed very young.

She had seen the old geisha Kikuyu to the second station down the line, she said.

“It’s very sad. We used to be able to work things out together, but now it’s every geisha for herself. The place has changed. New geisha come in and no one gets along with anyone else. I’ll be lonesome without Kikuyu. She was at the center of everything. And she made more money than any of the rest of us. Her people took very good care of her.”

Kikuyu had worked out her contract, and she was going home. Would she get married or would she open an inn or restaurant of her own? Shimamura asked.

“Kikuyu is a very sad case. She made a bad marriage, and she came here afterwards.” Komako was silent for a time, evidently unsure how much she should tell. She looked out toward the slope below the terraced fields, bright in the moonlight. “You know the new house halfway up the hill?”

“The restaurant—the Kikumura, is it called?”

“That’s the one. Kikuyu was supposed to manage the Kikumura, but at the last minute she had a change of heart. It caused all sorts of excitement. She had a patron build the place for her, and then, when she was all ready to move in, she threw it over. She found someone she liked and was going to marry him, but he ran off and left her. Is that what happens when you lose your head over a man? I wonder. She can’t very well go back to her
old work, and she can’t take over the restaurant now that she’s turned it down, and she’s ashamed to stay here after all that’s happened. There’s nothing for her to do but start over somewhere else. It makes me very sad to think about Kikuyu. There were all sorts of people—but of course we don’t really know the details.”

“Men? How many? Five or so?”

“I wonder.” Komako laughed softly and turned away. “Kikuyu was weak. A weakling.”

“Maybe there was nothing else she could do.”

“But isn’t it so? You can’t go losing your head over every man that likes you.” Her eyes were on the floor, and she was stroking her hair meditatively with a hair ornament. “It wasn’t easy, seeing her off.”

“And what happened to the restaurant?”

“The wife of the man who built it has taken it over.”

“An interesting situation. The wife managing the mistress’s restaurant.”

“But what else could they do? The place was ready to open, and the wife moved in with all her children.”

“What about her own house?”

“They left the old woman to take care of it, I hear. The man’s a farmer, but he likes to have his fun. He’s a very interesting fellow.”

“So it would seem. Is he well along in years?”

“He’s young. No more than thirty-one or thirty-two.”

“The mistress must be older than the wife, then.”

“They’re both twenty-six.”

“The ‘Kiku’ of ‘Kikumura’ would be from ‘Kikuyu.’ And the wife took over the name even?”

“But they couldn’t change the name once it was advertised.”

Shimamura straightened the collar of his kimono. Komako got up to close the window.

“Kikuyu knew all about you. She told me today you were here.”

“I saw her down in the office when she came to say good-by.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Do you know how I feel?” Komako threw open the window she had just shut, and sat down on the sill as if she meant to throw herself out.

“The stars here are different from the stars in Tokyo,” Shimamura said after a time. “They seem to float up from the sky.”

“Not tonight, though. The moon is too bright.… The snow was dreadful this year.”

“I understand there were times when the trains couldn’t get through.”

“I was almost afraid. The roads weren’t open until May, a month later than usual. You know the shop up at the ski grounds? An avalanche went through the second floor of it. The people below heard a strange noise and thought the rats were tearing up the kitchen. There were no rats, though, and when they looked upstairs the place was full of snow and the shutters and all had been carried off. It was just a surface slide, but there was a great deal of talk on the radio. The skiers were frightened away. I said I wouldn’t ski any more and I gave my skis away the end of last year, but I went out again after all. Twice, three times maybe. Have I changed?”

“What have you been doing since the music teacher died?”

“Don’t you worry about other people’s problems. I came back and I was waiting for you in February.”

“But if you were down on the coast you could have written me a letter.”

“I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly write the sort of letter your wife would see. I couldn’t bring myself to. I don’t tell lies just because people might be listening.” The words came at him in a sudden torrent. He only nodded. “Why don’t you turn out the light? You don’t have to sit in this swarm of insects.”

The moonlight, so bright that the furrows in the woman’s ear were clearly shadowed, struck deep into the room and seemed to turn the mats on the floor a chilly green.

“No. Let me go home.”

“I see you haven’t changed.” Shimamura raised his head. There was something strange in her manner. He peered into the slightly aquiline face.

“People say I haven’t changed since I came here. I was sixteen then. But life goes on the same, year after year.”

Her cheeks still carried the ruddiness of her north-country girlhood. In the moonlight the fine geishalike skin took on the luster of a sea shell.

“But did you hear I’d moved?”

“Since the teacher died? You’re not in the silkworms’ room any more, then? This time it’s a real geisha house?”

“A real geisha house? I suppose it is. They sell tobacco and candy in the shop, and I’m the only geisha they have. I have a real contract, and when I read late in the night I always use a candle to save electricity.”

Shimamura let out a loud guffaw.

“The meter, you know. Shouldn’t use too much electricity.”

“I see, I see.”

“But they’re very good to me, so good that I
sometimes find it hard to believe I’m really hired out as a geisha. When one of the children cries, the mother takes it outside so that I won’t be bothered. I have nothing to complain about. Only sometimes the bedding is crooked. When I come home late at night, everything is laid out for me, but the mattresses aren’t square one on the other, and the sheet is wrong. I hate it. After they’ve been so kind, though, I feel guilty making the bed over.”