Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Read Free Book Online Page B

and nothing about why she herself was in this house.
    Shimamura felt most uncomfortable at what she did say, however. Suspended there in the void, she seemed to be broadcasting to the four directions.
    As he stepped from the hallway, he saw something faintly white through the corner of his eye. It was a samisen box, and it struck him as larger and longer than it should be. He found it hard to imagine her carrying so unwieldy an object to parties. The darkened door inside the hallway slid open.
    “Do you mind if I step over this, Komako?” It was that clear voice, so beautiful that it was almost sad. Shimamura waited for an echo to come back.
    It was Yoko’s voice, the voice that had called out over the snow to the station master the night before.
    “No, please go ahead.” Yoko stepped lightly over the samisen box, a glass chamber-pot in her hand.
    It was clear, from the familiar way she had talked to the station master the evening before and from the way she wore “mountain trousers,” that she was a native of this snow country, but the bold pattern of her obi , half visible over the trousers, made the rough russet and black stripes of the latter seem fresh and cheerful, and for the samereason the long sleeves of her woolen kimono took on a certain voluptuous charm. The trousers, split just below the knees, filled out toward the hips, and the heavy cotton, for all its natural stiffness, was somehow supple and gentle.
    Yoko darted one quick, piercing glance at Shimamura and went silently out over the earthen floor.
    Even when he had left the house, Shimamura was haunted by that glance, burning just in front of his forehead. It was cold as a very distant light, for the inexpressible beauty of it had made his heart rise when, the night before, that light off in the mountains had passed across the girl’s face in the train window and lighted her eye for a moment. The impression came back to Shimamura, and with it the memory of the mirror filled with snow, and Komako’s red cheeks floating in the middle of it.
    He walked faster. His legs were round and plump, but he was seized with a certain abandon as he walked along gazing at the mountains he was so fond of, and his pace quickened, though he hardly knew it. Always ready to give himself up to reverie, he could not believe that the mirror floating over the evening scenery and the other snowy mirror were really works of man. They were part of nature, and part of some distant world.
    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 a 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 its 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