Free Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Page A

hand. “I’m sorry, but would you let her go home?” A tense, high-pitched voice assailed him. “Let her go home.”
    “Of course I’ll let her go home. Go on home,” he called out to Komako. “Don’t be a fool.”
    “And what say do you have in the matter?” Komako pushed Yoko roughly away from him.
    Shimamura tried to signal the taxi waiting in front of the station. Yoko clutched at his arm so tightly that his fingers were numbed. “I’ll send her home in a taxi,” he said. “Why don’t you go on ahead? People will be watching us.”
    Yoko nodded quickly, and turned away with almost unbelievable alacrity. Why was the girl always so earnest, so sober, Shimamura wondered. But such musings did not seem entirely in keeping with the occasion.
    That voice, so beautiful it was almost lonely, lingered in Shimamura’s ears as if it were echoing back from somewhere in the snowy mountains.
    “Where are you going?” Komako pulled at Shimamura. He had signaled the taxi and was walking toward it. “I won’t. I’m not going home.”
    For an instant Shimamura felt something very near physical revulsion.
    “I don’t know what there is among the three of you, but the man may be dying even now. She came for you, didn’t she, because he wants to see you. Go home like a good girl. You’ll regret it all your life if you don’t. What if he dies even while you’re standing here? Don’t be stubborn. Forgive and forget.”
    “Forgive and forget? You don’t understand. You don’t understand at all.”
    “And when they sent you to Tokyo, he was theonly one who saw you off, didn’t you say? Do you think it’s right not to say good-by to the man you yourself said was on the very first page of the very first volume of your diary? This is the very last page of his.”
    “But I don’t want to. I don’t want to see a man die.”
    It could have been the coldest heartlessness or too warm a passion—Shimamura did not know which.
    “I’ll not be able to write in my diary any more. I’ll burn it,” she said softly, almost to herself. Her cheeks were flushed. “You’re a good, simple person at heart, aren’t you? If you really are, I won’t mind sending my whole diary to you. You won’t laugh at me? You’re a good, honest person at heart, I’m sure.”
    Shimamura was moved by a wave of feeling he could not define himself. He thought he must indeed be the plainest, most honest person in the world. He no longer worried about sending Komako home. She said nothing more.
    A porter from the inn came to tell them that the gate to the tracks was open.
    Four or five villagers in somber winter dress got on and off the train.
    “I’ll not go to the platform with you. Good-by.” Komako stood inside the closed window of thewaiting-room. From the train window it was as though one strange piece of fruit had been left behind in the grimy glass case of a shabby mountain grocery.
    The window of the waiting-room was clear for an instant as the train started to move. Komako’s face glowed forth, and as quickly disappeared. It was the bright red it had been in the mirror that snowy morning, and for Shimamura that color again seemed to be the point at which he parted with reality.
    The train climbed the north slope of the Border Range into the long tunnel. On the far side it moved down a mountain valley. The color of evening was descending from chasms between the peaks. The dim brightness of the winter afternoon seemed to have been sucked into the earth, and the battered old train had shed its bright shell in the tunnel. There was no snow on the south slope.
    Following a stream, the train came out on the plain. A mountain, cut at the top in curious notches and spires, fell off in a graceful sweep to the far skirts. Over it the moon was rising. The solid, integral shape of the mountain, taking up the whole of the evening landscape there at the end of the plain, was set off in a deep purple against the pale light of the sky. The moon