Snow Country Read Free

light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains.
    There was no way for Yoko to know that she was being stared at. Her attention was concentrated on the sick man, and even had she looked toward Shimamura, she would probably not have seen her reflection, and she would have paid no attention to the man looking out the window.
    It did not occur to Shimamura that it was improper to stare at the girl so long and stealthily. That too was no doubt because he was taken by the unreal, otherworldly power of his mirror in the evening landscape.
    When, therefore, the girl called out to the station master, her manner again suggesting overearnestness, Shimamura perhaps saw her first of all as rather like a character out of an old, romantic tale.
    The window was dark by the time they came to the signal stop. The charm of the mirror faded with the fading landscape. Yoko’s face was still there, but for all the warmth of her ministrations, Shimamura had found in her a transparent coldness. He did not clear the window as it clouded over again.
    He was startled, then, when a half-hour later Yoko and the man got off the train at the same station as he. He looked around as though he were about to be drawn into something, but the cold air on the platform made him suddenly ashamed of his rudeness on the train. He crossed the tracks infront of the locomotive without looking back again.
    The man, clinging to Yoko’s shoulder, was about to climb down to the tracks from the platform opposite when from this side a station attendant raised a hand to stop them.
    A long freight train came out of the darkness to block them from sight.
    The porter from the inn was so well-equipped for the cold that he suggested a fireman. He had on ear flaps and high rubber boots. The woman looking out over the tracks from the waiting-room wore a blue cape with the cowl pulled over her head.
    Shimamura, still warm from the train, was not sure how cold it really was. This was his first taste of the snow-country winter, however, and he felt somewhat intimidated.
    “Is it as cold as all that?”
    “We’re ready for the winter. It’s always especially cold the night it clears after a snow. It must be below freezing tonight.”
    “This is below freezing, is it?” Shimamura looked up at the delicate icicles along the eaves as he climbed into the taxi. The white of the snow made the deep eaves look deeper still, as if everything had sunk quietly into the earth.
    “The cold here is different, though, that’s easyto see. It feels different when you touch something.”
    “Last year it went down to zero.”
    “How much snow?”
    “Ordinarily seven or eight feet, sometimes as much as twelve or thirteen, I’d say.”
    “The heavy snows come from now on?”
    “They’re just beginning. We had about a foot, but it’s melted down a good bit.”
    “It’s been melting, has it?”
    “We could have a heavy snow almost any time now, though.”
    It was the beginning of December.
    Shimamura’s nose had been stopped up by a stubborn cold, but it cleared to the middle of his head in the cold air, and began running as if the matter in it were washing cleanly away.
    “Is the girl who lived with the music teacher still around?”
    “She’s still around. You didn’t see her in the station? In the dark-blue cape?”
    “So that’s who it was. We can call her later, I suppose?”
    “This evening?”
    “This evening.”
    “I hear the music teacher’s son came back on your train. She was at the station to meet him.”
    The sick man he had watched in that eveningmirror, then, was the son of the music teacher in whose house the woman Shimamura had come to see was living.
    He felt a current pass through him, and yet the coincidence did not seem especially remarkable. Indeed he was surprised at himself for being so little surprised.
    Somewhere in his heart Shimamura saw a question, as clearly as if it