Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Read Free Book Online

glistened daintily along the eaves.
    “While you’re at it, would you mind shoveling a little from ours?” Dazzled by the bright light, a woman on her way back from the bath wiped at her forehead with a damp towel as she looked up at a man shoveling snow from a roof. A waitress, probably, who had drifted into the village a little in advance of the skiing season. Next door was a café with a sagging roof, its painted window flaking with age.
    Rows of stones held down the shingles with which most of the houses along the street were roofed. Only on the side exposed to the sun did the round stones show their black surfaces, less a moist black from the melting snow than an ink-stone black, beaten away at by icy wind and storm. The houses were of a kind with the dark stones on their roofs. The low eaves hugging the ground seemed to have in them the very essence of the north country.
    Children were breaking off chunks of ice from the drains and throwing them down in the middle of the road. It was no doubt the sparkle of the ice as it went flying off into bits that enchanted them so. Shimamura, standing in the sunlight, found it hard to believe that the ice could be so thick. He stopped for a moment to watch.
    A girl of twelve or thirteen stood knitting apart from the rest, her back against a stone wall. Under the baggy “mountain trousers,” her feet were bare but for sandals, and Shimamura could see that the soles were red and cracked from the cold. A girl of perhaps two stood on a bundle of firewood beside her patiently holding a ball of yarn. Even the faded, ashen line of reclaimed yarn from the younger girl to the older seemed warmly aglow.
    He could hear a carpenter’s plane in a ski shop seven or eight doors down the street. Five or sixgeisha were talking under the eaves opposite. Among them, he was sure, would be the woman, Komako—he had just that morning learned her geisha name from a maid at the inn. And indeed, there she was. She had apparently noticed him. The deadly serious expression on her face set her off from the others. She would of course flush scarlet, but if she could at least pretend that nothing had happened—before Shimamura had time to go further with his thoughts, he saw that she had flushed to the throat. She might better have looked away, but her head turned little by little to follow him, while her eyes were fixed on the ground in acute discomfort.
    Shimamura’s cheeks too were aflame. He walked briskly by, and immediately Komako came after him.
    “You mustn’t. You embarrass me, walking by at a time like this.”
    “I embarrass you—you think I’m not embarrassed myself, with all of you lined up to waylay me? I could hardly make myself walk past. Is it always this way?”
    “Yes, I suppose so. In the afternoon.”
    “But I’d think you’d be even more embarrassed, turning bright red and then chasing after me.”
    “What difference does it make?” The words were clear and definite, but she was blushing again. Shestopped and put her arm around a persimmon tree beside the road. “I ran after you because I thought I might ask you to come by my house.”
    “Is your house near here?”
    “Very near.”
    “I’ll come if you’ll let me read your diary.”
    “I’m going to burn my diary before I die.”
    “But isn’t there a sick man in your house?”
    “How did you know?”
    “You were at the station to meet him yesterday. You had on a dark-blue cape. I was sitting near him on the train. And there was a woman with him, looking after him, as gentle as she could be. His wife? Or someone who went from here to bring him home? Or someone from Tokyo? She was exactly like a mother. I was very much impressed.”
    “Why didn’t you say so last night? Why were you so quiet?” Something had upset her.
    “His wife?”
    Komako did not answer. “Why didn’t you say anything last night? What a strange person you are.”
    Shimamura did not like this sharpness. Nothing he had done and