Snow Country

by Yasunari Kawabata

  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 the 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 it's 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 when you learn when you're young, you never forget."

  "My hands have changed from doing this kind 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 doctor's 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."

  She curled up like a little child, and grabbed at the neck of his kimono with her two fists.

  The rich eyelashes again made him think that her eyes were half open.

  Her elbow against the brazier, Komako was scribbling on the back of an old magazine when Shimamura awoke the next morning.

  "I can't go home. I jumped up when the maid came to bring charcoal, but it was already broad daylight. The sun was shining in on the door. I was a little drunk last night, and I slept too well."

  "What time is it?"

  "It's already eight."

  "Let's go have a bath." Shimamura got out of bed.

  "I can't. Someone might see me in the hall." She was completely tamed. When Shimamura came back from the bath, he found her industriously cleaning the room, a kerchief draped artistically over her head.

  She had polished the legs of the table and the edge of the brazier almost too carefully, and she stirred up the charcoal with a practiced hand.

  Shimamura sat idly smoking, his feet in the kotatsu. When the ashes dropped from his cigarette Komako took them up in a handkerchief and brought him an ashtray. He laughed, a bright morning laugh. Komako laughed too.

  "If you had a husband, you'd spend all your time scolding him."

  "I would not. But I'd be laughed at for folding up even my dirty clothes. I can't help it. That's the way I am."

  "They say you can tell everything about a woman by looking inside her dresser drawers."

  "What a beautiful day." They were having breakfast, and the morning sun flooded the room. "I should have gone home early to practice the samisen. The sound is different on a day like this." She looked up at the crystal-clear sky.

  The snow on the distant mountains was soft and creamy, as if veiled in a faint smoke.

  Shimamura, remembering what the masseuse had said, suggested that she practice here instead. Immediately she telephoned her house to ask for music and a change of clothes.

  So the house he had seen the day before had a telephone, thought Shimamura. The eyes of the other girl, Yoko, floated into his mind.

  "That girl will bring your music?"

  "She might."

  "You're engaged to the son, are you?"

  "Well! When did you hear that?"

  "Yesterday."

  "Aren't you strange? If you heard it yesterday, why didn't you tell me?" But her tone showed none of the sharpness of the day before. Today there was only a clean smile on her face.

  "That sort of thing would be easier to talk about if I had less respect for you."

  "What are you really thinking, I wonder? That's why I don't like Tokyo people."

  "You're trying to change the subject. You haven't answered my question, you know."

  "I'm not trying to change the subject. You really believed it?"

  "I did."

  "You're lying again. You didn't really."

  "I couldn't quite believe all of it, as a matter of fact. But they said you went to work as a geisha to help pay doctors' bills."

  "It sounds like something our of a cheap magazine. But it's not true. I was never engaged to him. People seem to think I was, though. It wasn't to help anyone in particular that I became a geisha. Bur I owe a great deal to his mother, and I had to do what I could."

  "You're talking in riddles."

  "I'll tell you everything. Very clearly. Ther does seem to have been a time when his mother thought it would be a good idea for us to get married. But she only thought it. She never said a word. Both of us knew in a vague sort of way what was of her mind, but it went no farther. And that's all there is to tell."

  "Childhood friends."

  "That's right. But we've lived most of our lives apart. When they sent me to Tokyo to be a geisha, he was the only one who saw me off. I have that written down on the very first page of my very oldest diary."

  "If the two of you had stayed together, you'd probably be married by now."

  "I doubt it."

  "You would be, though."

  "You needn't worry about him. He'll be dead before long."

  "But is it right for you to be spending your nights away from home?"

  "It's not right for you to ask. How can a dying man keep me from doing as I like?"

  Shimamura could think of no answer.

  Why was it that Komako said not a word about the girl Yoko?

  And Yoko, who had taken care of the sick man on the train, quite as his mother must have when he was very young—how would she feel coming to an inn with a change of kimono for Komako, who was something, Shimamura could not know what, to the man Yoko had come home with?

  Shimamura found himself off in his usual distant fantasies.

  "Komako, Komako." Yoko's beautiful voice was low but clear.

  "Thank you very much." Komako went out to the dressing-room. "You brought it yourself, did you? It must have been heavy."

  Yoko left immediately.

  The top string snapped as Komako plucked tentatively at the samisen. Shimamura could tell even while she was changing the string and tuning the instrument that she had a firm, confident touch. She took up a bulky bundle and undid it on the kotatsu. Inside were an ordinary book of lyrics and some twenty scores. Shimamura glanced curiously at the latter.

  "You practice from these?"

  "I have to. There's no one here who can teach me."

  "What about the woman you live with?"

  "She's paralyzed."

  "If she can talk she ought to be able to help you."

  "But she can't talk. She can still use her left hand to correct mistakes in dancing, but it only annoys her to have to listen to the samisen and not be able to do anything about it."

  "Can you really understand the music from only a score?"

  "I can understand it very well."

  "The publishing gentleman would be happy if he knew he had a real geisha—not just an ordinary amateur—practicing from his scores way off here in the mountains."

  "In Tokyo I was expected to dance, and they gave me dancing lessons. But I got only the faintest idea of how to play the samisen. If I were to lose that there would be no one here to teach me again. So I use scores."

  "And singing?"

  "I don't like to sing. I did learn a few songs from my dancing, and I manage to get through them, but newer things I've had to pick up from the radio. I've no idea how near right I am. My own private style—you'd laugh at it, I know. And then my voice gives out when I'm singing for someone I know well. It's always loud and brave for strangers." She looked a little bashful for a moment, then brought herself up and glanced at Shimamura as though signaling that she was ready for him to begin.

  He was embarrassed. He was unfortunately no singer.

  He was generally familiar with the Nagauta music of the Tokyo theater and dance, and he knew the words to most of the repertoire. He had had no formal training, however. Indeed he associated Nagauta less with the parlor performance of the geisha that with the actor on the stage.

  "The customer is being difficult." Giving her lower lip a quick little bite, Komako brought the samisen to her knee, and, as if that made her a different person, turned earnestly to the lyrics before her.

  "I've been practicing this one since last fall."

  A chill swept over Shimamura. The goose flesh seemed to rise even to his cheeks. The first notes opened a transparent emptiness deep in his entrails, and in the emptiness the sound of the samisen reverberated. He was startled—or, better, he fell back as under a well-aimed blow. Taken with a feeling almost of reverence, washed by waves of remorse, defenseless, quite deprived of strength—there was nothing for him to do but give himself up to the current, to the pleasure of being swept off wherever Komako would take him.

  She was a mountain geisha, not yet twenty, and she could hardly
be as good as all that, he told himself. And in spite of the fact that she was in a small room, was she not slamming away at the instrument as though she were on the stage? He was being carried away by his own mountain emotionalism. Komako purposely read the words in a monotone, now slowing down and now jumping over a passage that was too much trouble; but gradually she seemed to fall into a spell. As her voice rose higher, Shimamura began to feel a little frightened. How far would that strong, sure touch take him? He rolled over and pillowed his head on an arm, as if in bored indifference.

  The end of the song released him. Ah, this woman is in love with me—but he was annoyed with himself for the thought.

  Komako looked up at the clear sky over the snow. "The tone is different on a day like this." The tone had been as rich and vibrant as her remark suggested. The air was different. There were no theater walls, there was no audience, there was none of the city dust. The notes went out crystalline into the clean winter morning, to sound on the far, snowy peaks.

  Practicing alone, not aware herself of what was happening, perhaps, but with all the wideness of nature in this mountain valley for her companion, she had come quite as a part of nature to take on this special power. Her very loneliness beat down sorrow and fostered a wild strength of will. There was no doubt that it had been a great victory of the will, even granted that she had an amount of preparatory training, for her to learn complicated airs from only a score, and presently go through them from memory.

  To Shimamura it was wasted effort, this way of living. He sensed in it too a longing that called out to him for sympathy. But the life and way of living no doubt flowed thus grandly from the samisen with a new worth for Komako herself.

  Shimamura, untrained in the niceties of samisen technique and conscious only of the emotion in the tone, was perhaps an ideal audience for Komako.

  By the time she had begun her third song—the voluptuous softness of the music itself may have been responsible—the chill and the goose flesh had disappeared, and Shimamura, relaxed and warm, was gazing into Komako's face. A feeling of intense physical nearness came over him.