Snow Country - A Short Story

When I returned, the apartment smelled as it had the first time I arrived. It was an empty smell, one of old wood and dusty walls. I didn’t know whether that smell had gone away and returned, or whether it had always remained and I had only gotten used to its pervasiveness. When something is so completely with us, it becomes nothing. Or perhaps the smell was a phantom of reclamation, coming back to take what was rightfully its own.

I placed my bags down near the table in the kitchen and walked inside to the living room. Adjacent to the living room sat the small Japanese-style room with the kerosene heater. I turned it on and squatted in front of it, rubbing my hands together. The smell of burning dust joined the smell of reclamation. It was a cold January, and I had only left Japan for a few weeks, traveling back home to attend my grandfather’s funeral. He had died peacefully, albeit a bit unexpectedly, and I was now weary with travel and grief.

I went back to the kitchen and began unpacking my bags. I placed the clothes in the laundry basket and my shoes in the entranceway. I looked for something to eat, but I had left nothing in the cabinets, so I decided to shower instead. After I stepped out and dried myself, I lay on the futon in the Japanese-style room. The kerosene heater blew dry air as I fell asleep.

My last thought before drifting off was of the pocket watch my grandfather had given me before he passed. It was one that men used to keep in the pockets of their suits back when men often wore suits. Sometime during the years he had lost its chain, and so I only had the watch face, which had broken, and now sat with frozen hands on the top of my bookshelf.

I slept and the snow came in heaps, great as it was even for the snow country.

The next morning I walked for forty minutes in the snow until I reached the school where I worked. I entered the building, walking through the cold hallways and heading to the teachers’ room. I said good morning, but many of the teachers were huddled around a tube television watching the news. There had been an accident this morning in town.

The roof of an old house had collapsed under the weight of the snow. It had trapped and killed the elderly man living inside. His family had found him hours later, dead and frozen.

Startled by the news, I took my seat, but was soon greeted by the teacher who sat next to me. Daisuke Hamaya was a kind man in his late twenties. We were the only teachers around that age, so we had grown close.

‘Pretty awful news,’ I said to him.

Daisuke nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it is, but how are you? How was the funeral?’

‘Well, you know. Tough, but I’m glad I could go.’

He nodded and then sighed. ‘You returned with the snow.’

I laughed. ‘I guess I did.’

The bell for homeroom rang and Daisuke stood. ‘Let’s get some drinks tonight,’ he said. ‘To celebrate your grandfather.’

I smiled. ‘The usual place?’

‘I’ll see you at seven.’ Daisuke headed to class. He taught math.

I didn’t have homeroom responsibilities as a guest language teacher, and so I spent the rest of the time preparing for class. The students were happy to see me when I arrived. I was happy for the distraction and glad to see their smiling faces. Many asked me if I had seen the accident on the news this morning. I said that I had. One of the girls said the snow had killed many people this year already. I hadn’t heard anything about that.

Her name was Kizuna, and she had long hair the color of midnight. She was good at English and liked speaking to me. She didn’t seem to be a normal middle-schooler, but something older and wiser.

‘It’s true,’ Kizuna said when I asked again. ‘The snow is killing many people this year.’

I nodded as if I understood what she was saying.

The rest of the day went by quickly. When I wasn’t in class, I stared out the window of the teachers’ room, watching the snow fall and gather in mounds and piles around the parking lot. By four o’clock in the afternoon, I was finished with work, and it was nearly dark out. I walked back through the snow, which had settled to a slow falling.

At one point, I passed a snow covered rice field. As it was winter, the rice field was long dead, but one of the scarecrows still stuck out from the patch between the rice paddies. It was a crude, faceless thing made of straw and wet cloth. From one of its wooden limbs hung a chain, which swayed and clanked in the wind. I wondered why the chain was there, but shivered and kept walking.

When I arrived home, I knelt in front of the kerosene heater and waited to go see Daisuke. I had forgotten once again to buy food, but I figured that I would just eat at the bar. By the time I left the apartment to meet him, my stomach growled and the snow had started again.

The bar could have been nameless. A crammed place, it sat between old buildings with old roofs and old curtains. But the food was fresh and the beer cold. Daisuke was sitting at the counter when I arrived and smiled broadly when he saw me. The old man behind the bar served us hot barley tea first, and I drank it quickly before Daisuke ordered us beers.

We clanked the glasses together.

‘So, really, how are you?’ Daisuke asked. ‘You know it’s hard to really talk at work. Everyone’s listening even when they pretend they aren’t.’

I sighed. The bottom of my glass had left a dark impression on the paper napkin. ‘You know, I wish I was a kid,’ I said.

‘You wish you were a kid?’

‘Yeah, grief is only grief when you are a kid.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it. When you’re young, grief is pure. It’s sadness. You can cry and curl up and sleep and truly feel it. But as an adult, grief is shattered. It’s like the snow here. It mixes with everything,’ I said.

Daisuke sipped his beer, a thoughtful look on his face. ‘I think I know what you mean.’

‘Adults don’t get to grieve purely. It’s always mixed with something else. Things that really have nothing to do with the grief itself. Work, money, time. Every little problem mixes with grief and overtakes it. There’s no beauty in the grief then because it gets perverted by everything. And so, it just becomes a heavy thing that collapses.’

Daisuke sighed. ‘Well, tonight let’s be kids then.’

I smiled and drank my beer.

We ordered too much food. Chicken on a stick, fried rice balls, liver, duck, and fried garlic. I knew I had been hungry but I ate quickly and my stomach ached. Daisuke ordered us two more beers and then pointed a bare chicken stick at me.

‘You know,’ he said. ‘You should visit the shrine in town. That might help you. Go there and pray a bit or something.’

I thought about it. ‘Is it okay for me to go there? I mean, do those gods want someone like me going there?’

‘Why because you’re foreign? Yeah, of course they do. They’re gods—they welcome anyone.’

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but when I left Daisuke that night, the wind had picked up and the snow blew sideways and the chains on the tires of the taxis clinked in the street.

After school, I stopped by the shrine.

It was large and unkempt, tucked back in the corner of one of the rice fields. Someone had cleared the path of snow earlier, but it was already covered again. The fresh layer was pure and white and as I approached, I smelled a wood-burning stove.

I walked beneath the red gate and went to the place where one prayed. I took out a five yen coin from my wallet with cold fingers and threw it in the slotted wooden box and shook the long rope. The bell attached to the top of it rang brassy and loud. Then I bowed twice, clapped twice, and prayed.

When I opened my eyes, a girl stood in front of me, by the door that led to the inside of the shrine.

‘Sensei,’ she said. Her hair was long and black as midnight.

‘Ah, Kizuna? What are you doing here?’

She held out her arms. She wore a white robe with red, pleated pants. ‘I work here sometimes,’ she said. ‘As a shrine maiden.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, rubbing my hands together.

‘Do you want to come inside and get warm? We have tea.’

‘I should be going, I think,’ I said.

‘Come on, Sensei,’ she said. ‘It’s so cold out. And I want to show you something later anyway.’

I nodded and went inside, sitting in front of the wood burning stove. Kizuna disappeared somewhere in the back and then came out holding tea and small sweets on a red tray. She placed them on the small table between the chairs and then sat down next to me.

‘Are you alone here?’ I asked. The wind rattled the wooden sliding door.

She nodded. ‘I often work here alone.’

We drank our tea. When she was nearly finished, she reached into the sleeve of her robe and pulled from it a small paper scroll. She asked if we could say the prayer together, that it might bring me peace from my grief.

I didn’t remember telling her about my grandfather, but I said yes. Kizuna unraveled the scroll and read, and when she finished, the shrine was cold and silent.

I didn’t say anything, but then Kizuna said she wanted to show me something outside.

‘You didn’t believe me when I said that many people had died this year because of the snow. So I wanted to show you.’ She didn’t grab her jacket, just stepped out into the blizzard in her robes.

I followed her, a hollow growing in my stomach. The wind whipped and the snow pelted my face. I lifted my arm for protection, but Kizuna walked unperturbed in front of me. I almost lost her in the white as I followed. I thought we were walking over the rice paddies themselves, but I couldn’t be sure. Snow fell into my boots and wet my socks. I shivered and then caught sight of the red bottom of Kizuna’s robes.

She stood next to one of the scarecrows. The chain hanging from its arm swung in the wind and clanked against itself. Kizuna stretched out a small, white hand and brushed the snow off the chain and then she unraveled it from the arm of the scarecrow.

‘You see?’ she said.

I didn’t go to school the next day. Or the one after. On the fourth day, Daisuke came to my apartment and knocked on my door.

‘Are you there?’ he called, his voice muffled. ‘Open up.’

I stumbled to the doorway, a pain growing in my stomach. I unlatched the door and he stepped inside the entranceway. He took off his hat and snow fell to the tiled floor.

‘Everyone’s been worried about you,’ he said. Then he tilted his head. ‘Have you been eating?’

I shook my head. ‘I haven’t had an appetite lately. But come in.’

We went and sat on the tatami in front of the kerosene heater. Daisuke blew into his hands and rubbed them together.

‘Why haven’t you come to school?’ he asked.

I toyed with the empty water glass on the small wooden table in the room. ‘I went to the shrine, like you said.’

‘You did?’

‘One of our students is a shrine maiden there. Kizuna.’

‘Who?’

I thought for a moment. ‘You might not know her. She’s a third year student.’ Daisuke only taught the first years.

‘At any rate, that’s an old shrine. I don’t think they have shrine maidens.’

I shrugged. ‘She was there.’

We talked for a while longer. The pain in my stomach lessened, and it grew warmer in the house while Daisuke was there, but he soon had to leave. When he did, I tried to occupy myself. I tried to read and listen to music, but I couldn’t and I headed out in the snow.

I saw the small light of the wood burning stove far before I could make out the roof of the shrine in the storm.

Kizuna brought tea and sweets. As we ate, I realized that I had eaten nothing but the sweets she brought me lately. I said as much.

‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘These are not just any sweets. They are special for this shrine. It’s like food from the gods.’ She smiled, her white teeth made her black hair look ever more nocturne. ‘You can eat as much as you like.’

So I ate my fill of sweets and drank the tea, staring into the fire and listening as the building shook in the wind. At some point, I went home, but I did not remember at what time. There were no clocks in the shrine, and now it always snowed, it never grew light or dark.

I thought weeks had passed, but no one called. Daisuke did not come to see me. All I thought about was the snow and it never stopped falling. I heard the clink of the chains as readily as the snow fell.

Each day, I went to the shrine. Each day Kizuna was there waiting for me. It was the only place I found peace. She brought tea and read the prayer from the scroll, and then we would walk out among the snow and the rice fields, to the scarecrow with the chains. At first only Kizuna touched them, but then she soon let me hold them. They were heavy and the cold metal chilled my bones.

Months passed but it never neared the end of winter. I grew tired and stayed at the shrine all the time. I slept in the warm blankets on the tatami mats and Kizuna was always there. She brought me tea and brought wood for the stove. When I woke, I ate the sweets. They were soft mochi on the outside, but the filling was red. Not the red bean paste that I had eaten in many Japanese desserts, but something brighter and bloodied. When I ate the sweets, the pain in my stomach lessened, but it always returned.

When afternoon or evening, I didn’t know which, we went out into the snow. We came to the scarecrow, but the chains were not there. Kizuna turned to me, her hair perfectly unmoving despite the wind, and wrapped her slim fingers around my wrists. When she took them away, I gasped in pain. Fetters clanked against my wrists and the chains hung from them, scraping the ground and creating divots in the snow.

We returned the shrine. I slept with the chains around my wrists and they soon turned the skin bloody and raw. Kizuna took off the fetters each day. She cleaned the wounds and bandaged them, but she always placed the chains back on my wrists, and they always bled again. I sat huddled in front of the wood burning stove, the chains clanking as I brought the tea cup up to my lips. Kizuna sat next to me with her hands folded on her lap. I thought she no longer looked like my student, but something different.

She woke me one day with a small hand on my shoulder. I followed her out into the snow, and I knew that it was today. I pulled the chains along the path, tearing up snow and dead dirt and forgotten roots of rice plants. The trail behind me was one of broken earth, every few paces measured with the dripping blood of my wrists. Kizuna walked next to me, her footprints perfect impressions of a perfect walk.

We walked for a long time, farther than where the scarecrow usually was. The blizzard soared and I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me. I took another step forward, but something had caught the chains and tugged at my wrists. I turned my head and saw that the ends were frozen to the ground, the snow already covering the dark metal.

I laughed. ‘I understand what you were saying before,’ I said to Kizuna. ‘I understand now.’

She smiled at me and put a hand on my cheek. More and more of the chains froze to the ground and I was pulled down to my knees. Kizuna took out the scroll and read the prayer, her voice clear and brilliant. Then she left me with a bow.

I knelt and bowed my head. The snow grew around me in mounds and piles and began to cover me. I would have looked to the sun, but there was no sun, only endless white and gray. The shrine and the wood burning stove were entities of another realm. The red hem of Kizuna’s pants was gone. My wrists dripped bloody on the ground and I waited alone. I waited beneath the tundric firmament, plunging into apocryphal darkness and dreamed winters and the chains fell hard to the snow when they grew heavy.