Snow Country Read Free Page A

were standing there before him: was there something, what would happen, between the woman his hand remembered and the woman in whose eye that mountain light had glowed? Or had he not yet shaken off the spell of the evening landscape in that mirror? He wondered whether the flowing landscape was not perhaps symbolic of the passage of time.
    The hot-spring inn had its fewest guests in the weeks before the skiing season began, and by the time Shimamura had come up from the bath the place seemed to be asleep. The glass doors rattled slightly each time he took a step down the sagging corridor. At the end, where it turned past the office, he saw the tall figure of the woman, her skirts trailing coldly off across the dark floor.
    He started back as he saw the long skirts—hadshe finally become a geisha? She did not come toward him, she did not bend in the slightest movement of recognition. From the distance he caught something intent and serious in the still form. He hurried up to her, but they said nothing even when he was beside her. She started to smile through the thick, white geisha’s powder. Instead she melted into tears, and the two of them walked off silently toward his room.
    In spite of what had passed between them, he had not written to her, or come to see her, or sent her the dance instructions he had promised. She was no doubt left to think that he had laughed at her and forgotten her. It should therefore have been his part to begin with an apology or an excuse, but as they walked along, not looking at each other, he could tell that, far from blaming him, she had room in her heart only for the pleasure of regaining what had been lost. He knew that if he spoke he would only make himself seem the more wanting in seriousness. Overpowered by the woman, he walked along wrapped in a soft happiness. Abruptly, at the foot of the stairs, he shoved his left fist before her eyes, with only the forefinger extended.
    “This remembered you best of all.”
    “Oh?” The woman took the finger in her hand and clung to it as though to lead him upstairs.
    She let go his hand as they came to the
kotatsu
* in his room, and suddenly she was red from her forehead to her throat. As if to conceal her confusion, she clutched at his hand again.
    “This remembered me?”
    “Not the right hand. This.” He pushed his right hand into the
kotatsu
to warm it, and again gave her his left fist with the finger extended.
    “I know.” Her face carefully composed, she laughed softly. She opened his hand, and pressed her cheek against it. “This remembered me?”
    “Cold! I don’t think I’ve ever touched such cold hair.”
    “Is there snow in Tokyo yet?”
    “You remember what you said then? But you were wrong. Why else would anyone come to such a place in December?”
    “Then”: the danger of avalanches was over, and the season for climbing mountains in the spring green had come.
    Presently the new sprouts would be gone from the table.
    Shimamura, who lived a life of idleness, foundthat he tended to lose his honesty with himself, and he frequently went out alone into the mountains to recover something of it. He had come down to the hot-spring village after seven days in the Border Range. He asked to have a geisha called. Unfortunately, however, there was a celebration that day in honor of the opening of a new road, the maid said, so lively a celebration that the town’s combined cocoon-warehouse and theater had been taken over, and the twelve or thirteen geisha had more than enough to keep them busy. The girl who lived at the music teacher’s might come, though. She sometimes helped at parties, but she would have gone home after no more than one or two dances. As Shimamura questioned her, the maid told him more about the girl at the music teacher’s: the samisen and dancing teacher had living with her a girl who was not a geisha but who was sometimes asked to help at large parties. Since there were no young apprentice geisha in the town,