Free Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata Page B

was no longer an afternoon white, but, faintly colored, it had not yet taken onthe clear coldness of the winter night. There was not a bird in the sky. Nothing broke the lines of the wide skirts to the right and the left. Where the mountain swept down to meet the river, a stark white building, a hydroelectric plant perhaps, stood out sharply from the withered scene the train window framed, one last spot saved from the night.
    The window began to steam over. The landscape outside was dusky, and the figures of the passengers floated up half-transparent. It was the play of that evening mirror again. The train, probably no more than three or four worn-out, faded, old-fashioned coaches strung together, was not from the same world as the trains one finds on the main lines. The light inside was dim.
    Shimamura abandoned himself to the fancy that he had stepped into some unreal conveyance, that he was being borne away in emptiness, cut off from time and place. The monotonous sound of the wheels became the woman’s voice.
    Her words, though short and broken, were a sign that she was alive in all her vital intensity, and he knew he had not forgotten her from the fact that listening was a trial. But to the Shimamura of that moment, moving away from the woman, the voice was already a distant one that could do no more than sharpen the poignancy of travel.
    Would Yukio be breathing his last even now? Komako had for reasons of her own refused to go home; and had she then failed to reach his bedside in time?
    There were so few passengers that Shimamura felt a little uneasy.
    Besides Shimamura himself, there were only a man, probably in his fifties, and opposite him a red-faced girl. A black shawl was thrown over the full flesh of her shoulders, and her cheeks were a wonderful, fiery red. She leaned slightly forward to catch every word the man said, and she answered him happily. A pair off on a long journey together, Shimamura concluded.
    As the train pulled into a station behind which rose the chimneys of spinning-factories, however, the man hastily got up, took a wicker trunk from the baggage rack, and threw it out the window to the platform. “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime,” he called back to the girl as he hurried from the train.
    Shimamura suddenly wanted to weep. He had been caught quite off guard, and it struck him afresh that he had said good-bye to the woman and was on his way home.
    He had not considered the possibility that the two had simply met on the train. The man was perhaps a traveling salesman.
    * A charcoal brazier covered by a wooden frame and a quilt. Although it warms little more than the hands and feet, the
kotatsu
is the only heating device in the ordinary Japanese house.
    † The sash with which a kimono is tied. A woman’s
obi
is wide and stiff, a man’s narrower and usually softer.

PART TWO
    I T WAS the egg-laying season for moths, Shimamura’s wife told him as he left Tokyo, and he was not to leave his clothes hanging in the open. There were indeed moths at the inn. Five or six large corn-colored moths clung to the decorative lantern under the eaves, and in the little dressing-room was a moth whose body was large out of all proportion to its wings.
    The windows were still screened from the summer. A moth so still that it might have been glued there clung to one of the screens. Its feelers stoodout like delicate wool, the color of cedar bark, and its wings, the length of a woman’s finger, were a pale, almost diaphanous green. The ranges of mountains beyond were already autumn-red in the evening sun. That one spot of pale green struck him as oddly like the color of death. The fore and after wings overlapped to make a deeper green, and the wings fluttered like thin pieces of paper in the autumn wind.
    Wondering if the moth was alive, Shimamura went over to the window and rubbed his finger over the inside of the screen. The moth did not move. He struck at it with his fist, and it fell like a leaf from a