Free Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

warm, moist eyes.
    She picked up the hair ornament that had fallen to the floor.
    “You really must go back tomorrow,” she said quietly.
    As Shimamura was changing clothes to leave on the three-o’clock train the next afternoon, the manager of the inn beckoned Komako into the hall. “Let’s see. Suppose we make it about eleven hours,” he could hear Komako’s answer. They were evidently discussing the bill for her services as a geisha, and the manager perhaps thought it would be unreasonable to charge for the whole sixteen or seventeen hours.
    The bill as a matter of fact was computed by the hour—“Left at five,” or “Left at twelve”—without the usual charge for overnight services.
    Komako, in an overcoat and a white scarf, saw him to the station.
    Even when he had finished buying presents to take back to Tokyo, he had some twenty minutes to kill. Walking with Komako in the slightly raised station plaza, he thought what a narrow little valley it was, crowded in among the snowy mountains. Komako’s too-black hair was a little touching, a little sad, in the loneliness of the shadowed mountain pocket.
    The sun shone dimly on a spot in the mountains far down the river.
    “It’s melted a good deal since I came.”
    “Two days of snow, though, and we’ll have six feet. Then it snows again, and before long the lights on those poles are out of sight. I’ll walk along thinking of you, and I’ll find myself strung up on a wire.”
    “The snow is that deep?”
    “They say that in the next town up the line the schoolchildren jump naked from the second floor of the dormitory. They sink out of sight in the snow, and they move around under it as though they were swimming. Look, a snowplow.”
    “I’d like to see it that deep. But I suppose the inn will be crowded. And there might be danger of slides along the way.”
    “With you it’s not a question of money, is it?Have you always had so much to spend?” She turned to look up at his face. “Why don’t you grow a mustache?”
    “I’ve thought of it.” Shimamura, freshly shaven, stroked the blue-black traces of his beard. A deep line from the corner of his mouth set off the softness of his cheek. Was that, he wondered, what Komako found attractive? “You always look a little as though you’d just shaved too when you take off that powder.”
    “Listen! The crows. That frightening way they sometimes have. Where are they, I wonder? And isn’t it cold!” Komako hugged herself as she looked up at the sky.
    “Shall we go in by the stove?”
    A figure in “mountain trousers” came running up the wide road from the main highway into the station plaza. It was Yoko.
    “Komako. Yukio—Komako,” she panted, clinging to Komako like a child that has run frightened to its mother, “come home. Right away. Yukio’s worse. Right away.”
    Komako closed her eyes, as if from the pain of the assault on her shoulder. Her face was white, but she shook her head with surprising firmness.
    “I can’t go home. I’m seeing off a guest.”
    Shimamura was startled. “You needn’t see me off.”
    “It’s not right to leave. How do I know you’ll come again?”
    “I’ll come, I’ll come.”
    Yoko seemed not to hear the exchange. “I just called the inn,” she went on feverishly, “and they said you were at the station. So I came here. I ran all the way. Yukio is asking for you.” She pulled at Komako, but Komako shook her off impatiently.
    “Leave me alone.”
    It was Komako who reeled back, however. She retched violently, but nothing came from her mouth. The rims of her eyes were moist. There was goose flesh on her cheeks.
    Yoko stood rigid, gazing at Komako. Her face, like a mask, wore an expression of such utter earnestness that it was impossible to tell whether she was angry or surprised or grieved. It seemed an extraordinarily pure and simple face to Shimamura.
    She turned quickly and, without the slightest change of expression, clutched at Shimamura’s