Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing that had happened seemed to call for it, and he wondered if something basic in the woman’s nature might not be coming to the surface. Still, when she came at himthe second time, he had to admit that he was being hit in a vulnerable spot. This morning, as he glanced at Komako in that mirror reflecting the mountain snow, he had of course thought of the girl in the evening train window. Why then had he said nothing?
    “It doesn’t matter if there is a sick man. No one ever comes to my room.” Komako went in through an opening in a low stone wall.
    To the right was a small field, and to the left persimmon trees stood along the wall that marked off the neighboring plot. There seemed to be a flower garden in front of the house, and red carp were swimming in the little lotus pond. The ice had been broken away and lay piled along the bank. The house was old and decayed, like the pitted trunk of a persimmon. There were patches of snow on the roof, the rafters of which sagged to draw a wavy line at the eaves.
    The air in the earthen-floored hallway was still and cold. Shimamura was led up a ladder before his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. It was a ladder in the truest sense of the word, and the room at the top was an attic.
    “This is the room the silkworms used to live in. Are you surprised?”
    “You’re lucky you’ve never fallen downstairs, drinking the way you do.”
    “I have. But generally when I’ve had too much to drink I crawl into the kotatsu downstairs and go off to sleep.” She pushed her hand tentatively into the kotatsu , then went below for charcoal. Shimamura looked around at the curious room. Although there was but one low window, opening to the south, the freshly changed paper on the door turned off the rays of the sun brightly. The walls had been industriously pasted over with rice paper, so that the effect was rather like the inside of an old-fashioned paper box; but overhead was only the bare roof sloping down toward the window, as if a dark loneliness had settled itself over the room. Wondering what might be on the other side of the wall, Shimamura had the uneasy feeling that he was suspended in a void. But the walls and the floor, for all their shabbiness, were spotlessly clean.
    For a moment he was taken with the fancy that the light must pass through Komako, living in the silkworms’ room, as it passed through the translucent silkworms.
    The kotatsu was covered with a quilt of the same rough, striped cotton material as the standard “mountain trousers.” The chest of drawers was old, but the grain of the wood was fine and straight—perhaps it was a relic of Komako’s years in Tokyo. It was badly paired with a cheap dresser,while the vermilion sewing-box gave off the luxurious glow of good lacquer. The boxes stacked along the wall behind a thin woolen curtain apparently served as bookshelves.
    The kimono of the evening before hung on the wall, open to show the brilliant red under-kimono.
    Komako came spryly up the ladder with a supply of charcoal.
    “It’s from the sickroom. But you needn’t worry. They say fire spreads no germs.” Her newly dressed hair almost brushed the kotatsu as she stirred away at the coals. The music teacher’s son had intestinal tuberculosis, she said, and had come home to die.
    But it was not entirely accurate to say that he had “come home.” He had as a matter of fact not been born here. This was his mother’s home. His mother had taught dancing down on the coast even when she was no longer a geisha, but she had had a stroke while she was still in her forties, and had come back to this hot spring to recover. The son, fond of machinery since he was a child, had stayed behind to work in a watch-shop. Presently he moved to Tokyo and started going to night school, and the strain was evidently too much for him. He was only twenty-five.
    All this Komako told him with no hesitation, but she said nothing about the girl who hadbrought the man home,