Snow Country (12 page)

“Have you ever tasted one of these?” he asked Shimamura, picking up a pomegranatelike
akebi
. “I can bring some in from the mountains if you like.” Shimamura, back from a walk, watched him tie the
akebi
, stem and all, to a maple branch.

The freshly cut branches were so long that they brushed against the eaves. The hallway glowed a bright, fresh scarlet. The leaves were extraordinarily large.

As Shimamura took the cool
akebi
in his hand,
he noticed that Yoko was sitting by the hearth in the office.

The innkeeper’s wife was heating
saké
in a brass boiler. Yoko, seated opposite her, nodded quickly in answer to each remark. She was dressed informally, though she did not have on the everyday “mountain trousers.” Her plain woolen kimono was freshly washed.

“That girl is working here?” Shimamura asked the porter nonchalantly.

“Yes, sir. Thanks to all of you, we’ve had to take on extra help.”

“You, for instance.”

“That’s right. She’s an unusual type, though, for a girl from these parts.”

Yoko worked only in the kitchen, apparently. She was not yet serving at parties. As the inn filled, the voices of the maids in the kitchen became louder, but he did not remember having heard Yoko’s clear voice among them. The maid who took care of his room said that Yoko liked to sing in the bath before she went to bed, but that, too, Shimamura had missed.

Now that he knew Yoko was in the house, he felt strangely reluctant to call Komako. He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and
yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.

He was sure that Yoko’s eyes, for all their innocence, could send a probing light to the heart of these matters, and he somehow felt drawn to her too.

Komako came often enough without being called.

When he went to see the maple leaves up the valley, he passed her house. Hearing the automobile and thinking it must be he, she ran out to look—and he did not even glance back, she complained. That was most unfeeling of him. She of course stopped by whenever she came to the inn, and she stopped by too on her way to the bath. When she was to go to a party, she came an hour or so early and waited in his room for the maid to call her. Often she would slip away from a party for a few minutes. After retouching her face in the mirror, she would stand up to leave. “Back to work. I’m all business. Business, business.”

She was in the habit of forgetting something she had brought with her, a cloak, perhaps, or the cover to a samisen plectrum.

“Last night when I got home there was no hot water for tea. I hunted through the kitchen and
found the left-overs from breakfast. Co-o-old.… They didn’t call me this morning. When I woke up it was already ten-thirty. I meant to come see you at seven, but it was no good.”

Such were the things she talked of. Or she told him of the inn she had gone to first, and the next and the next, and the parties she had been to at each.

“I’ll come again later.” She had a glass of water before she left. “Or maybe I won’t. Thirty guests and only three of us. I’ll be much too busy.”

But almost immediately she was back.

“It’s hard work. Thirty of them and only three of us. And the other two are the very oldest and the very youngest in town, and that leaves all the hard work for me. Stingy people. A travel club of some sort, I suppose. With thirty guests you need at least six geisha. I’ll go have a drink and pick a fight with them.”

So it was every day. Komako must have wanted to crawl away and hide at the thought of where it was leading. But that indefinable air of loneliness only made her the more seductive.

“The floor always creaks when I come down the hall. I walk very softly, but they hear me just the same. ‘Off to the Camellia Room again, Komako?’ they say as I go by the kitchen. I never thought I’d have to worry so about my reputation.”

“The town’s really too small.”

“Everyone has heard about us, of course.”

“That will never do.”

“You begin to have a bad name, and you’re ruined in a little place like this.” But she looked up and smiled. “It makes no difference. My kind can find work anywhere.”

That straightforward manner, so replete with direct, immediate feeling, was quite foreign to Shimamura, the idler who had inherited his money.

“It will be the same, wherever I go. There’s nothing to be upset about.”

But he caught an echo of the woman underneath the surface nonchalance.

“And I can’t complain. After all, only women are able really to love.” She flushed a little and looked at the floor.

Her kimono stood out from her neck, and her back and shoulders were like a white fan spread under it. There was something sad about the full flesh under that white powder. It suggested a woolen cloth, and again it suggested the pelt of some animal.

“In the world as it is,” he murmured, chilled at the sterility of the words even as he spoke.

But Komako only replied: “As it always has
been.” She raised her head and added absent-mindedly: “You didn’t know that?”

The red under-kimono clinging to her skin disappeared as she looked up.

Shimamura was translating Valéry and Alain, and French treatises on the dance from the golden age of the Russian ballet. He meant to bring them out in a small luxury edition at his own expense. The book would in all likelihood contribute nothing to the Japanese dancing world. One could nonetheless say, if pressed, that it would bring aid and comfort to Shimamura. He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang. Off on a trip, he saw no need to hurry himself.

He spent much of his time watching insects in their death agonies.

Each day, as the autumn grew colder, insects died on the floor of his room. Stiff-winged insects fell on their backs and were unable to get to their feet again. A bee walked a little and collapsed, walked a little and collapsed. It was a quiet death that came with the change of seasons. Looking closely, however, Shimamura could see that the legs and feelers were trembling in the struggle to
live. For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room
^*
seemed enormous.

As he picked up a dead insect to throw it out, he sometimes thought for an instant of the children he had left in Tokyo.

A moth on the screen was still for a very long time. It too was dead, and it fell to the earth like a dead leaf. Occasionally a moth fell from the wall. Taking it up in his hand, Shimamura would wonder how to account for such beauty.

The screens were removed, and the singing of the insects was more subdued and lonely day by day.

The russet deepened on the Border Range. In the evening sun the mountains lighted up sharply, like a rather chilly stone. The inn was filled with maple-viewing guests.

“I don’t think I’ll come again tonight. Some people from the village are having a party.” Komako left, and presently he heard a drum in the large banquet-room, and strident women’s voices. At the very height of the festivities he was startled by a clear voice almost at his elbow.

“May I come in?” It was Yoko. “Komako asked me to bring this.”

She thrust her hand out like a postman. Then, remembering her manners, she knelt down awkwardly
before him. Shimamura opened the knotted bit of paper, and Yoko was gone. He had not had time to speak to her.

“Having a fine, noisy time. And drinking.” That was the whole of the message, written in a drunken hand on a paper napkin.

Not ten minutes later Komako staggered in.

“Did she bring something to you?”

“She did.”

“Oh?” Komako cocked an eye at him in wonderfully high spirits. “I do feel good. I said I’d go order more
saké
, and I ran away. The porter caught me. But
saké
is wonderful. I don’t care a bit if the floor creaks. I don’t care if they scold me. As soon as I come here I start feeling drunk, though. Damn. Well, back to work.”

“You’re rosy down to the tips of your fingers.”

“Business is waiting. Business, business. Did she say anything? Terribly jealous. Do you know how jealous?”

“Who?”

“Someone will be murdered one of these days.”

“She’s working here?”

“She brings
saké
, and then stands there staring in at us, with her eyes flashing. I suppose you like her sort of eyes.”

“She probably thinks you’re a disgrace.”

“That’s why I gave her a note to bring to you.

I want water. Give me water. Who’s a disgrace? Try seducing her too before you answer my question. Am I drunk?” She peered into the mirror, bracing both hands against the stand. A moment later, kicking aside the long skirts, she swept from the room.

The party was over. The inn was soon quiet, and Shimamura could hear a distant clatter of dishes. Komako must have been taken off by a guest to a second party, he concluded; but just then Yoko came in with another bit of paper.

“Decided not to go to Sampukan go from here to the Plum Room may stop by on way home good night.”

Shimamura smiled wryly, a little uncomfortable before Yoko. “Thank you very much. You’ve come to help here?”

She darted a glance at him with those beautiful eyes, so bright that he felt impaled on them. His discomfort was growing.

The girl left a deep impression each time he saw her, and now she was sitting before him—a strange uneasiness swept over him. Her too-serious manner made her seem always at the very center of some remarkable occurrence.

“They’re keeping you busy, I suppose.”

“But there’s very little I can do.”

“It’s strange how often I see you. The first time was when you were bringing that man home. You talked to the station master about your brother. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“They say you sing in the bath before you go to bed.”

“Really! They accuse me of having such bad manners?” The voice was astonishingly beautiful.

“I feel I know everything about you.”

“Oh? And have you asked Komako, then?”

“She won’t say a thing. She seems to dislike talking about you.”

“I see.” Yoko turned quickly away. “Komako is a fine person, but she’s not been lucky. Be good to her.” She spoke rapidly, and her voice trembled very slightly on the last words.

“But there’s nothing I can do for her.”

It seemed that the girl’s whole body must soon be trembling. Shimamura looked away, fearful that a dangerous light would be breaking out on the too-earnest face.

He laughed. “I think I’d best go back to Tokyo soon.”

“I’m going to Tokyo myself.”

“When?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Shall I see you to Tokyo when I go back?”

“Please do.” The seriousness was intense, and at the same time her tone suggested that the matter was after all trivial. Shimamura was startled.

“If it will be all right with your family.”

“The brother who works on the railroad is all the family I have. I can decide for myself.”

“Have you made arrangements in Tokyo?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to Komako, then?”

“To Komako? I don’t like Komako. I haven’t talked to her.”

She looked up at him with moist eyes—a sign perhaps that her defenses were breaking down—and he found in them an uncanny sort of beauty. But at that moment his affection for Komako welled up violently. To run off to Tokyo, as if eloping, with a nondescript woman would somehow be in the nature of an intense apology to Komako, and a penance for Shimamura himself.

“It doesn’t frighten you to go off alone with a man?”

“Why should it?”

“It doesn’t seem dangerous to go to Tokyo without at least deciding where you will stay and what you might want to do?”

“A woman by herself can always get by.” There was a delicious lilt in her speech. Her eyes were
fixed on his as she spoke again: “You won’t hire me as a maid?”

“Really, now. Hire you as a maid?”

“But I don’t want to be a maid.”

“What were you in Tokyo before?”

“A nurse.”

“You were in a hospital? Or in nursing school?”

“I just thought I’d like to be a nurse.”

Shimamura smiled. This perhaps explained the earnestness with which she had taken care of the music teacher’s son on the train.

“And you still want to be a nurse?”

“I won’t be a nurse now.”

“But you’ll have to make up your mind. This indecisiveness will never do.”

“Indecisiveness? It has nothing to do with indecisiveness.” Her laugh threw back the accusation.

Her laugh, like her voice, was so high and clear that it was almost lonely. There was not a suggestion in it of the dull or the simple-minded; but it struck emptily at the shell of Shimamura’s heart, and fell away in silence.

“What’s funny?”

“But there has only been one man I could possibly nurse.”

Again Shimamura was startled.

“I could never again.”

“I see.” His answer was quiet. He had been caught off guard. “They say you spend all your time at the cemetery.”

“I do.”

“And for the rest of your life you can never nurse anyone else, or visit anyone else’s grave?”

“Never again.”

“How can you leave the grave and go off to Tokyo, then?”

“I’m sorry. Do take me with you.”

“Komako says you’re frightfully jealous. Wasn’t the man her fiancé?”

“Yukio? It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”

“Why do you dislike Komako, then?”

“Komako.” She spoke as if calling to someone in the same room, and she gazed hotly at Shimamura. “Be good to Komako.”

“But I can do nothing for her.”

There were tears in the corners of Yoko’s eyes. She sniffled as she slapped at a small moth on the matting. “Komako says I’ll go crazy.” With that she slipped from the room.

Shimamura felt a chill come over him.

As he opened the window to throw out the moth, he caught a glimpse of the drunken Komako playing parlor games with a guest. She leaned forward half from her seat, as though to push her
advantage home by force. The sky had clouded over. Shimamura went down for a bath.