Snow Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

sprawled over the table and took another drink of water.
    “Get up. Get up when a person tells you to.”
    “Which do you want me to do?”
    “All right, go to sleep.”
    “You aren’t making much sense, you know.” He pulled her into bed after him.
    Her face was turned half away, hidden from him, but after a time she thrust her lips violently toward him.
    Then, as if in a delirium she were trying to tell of her pain, she repeated over and over, he did not know how many times: “No, no. Didn’t you say you wanted to be friends?”
    The almost too serious tone of it rather dulled his ardor, and as he saw her wrinkle her forehead in the effort to control herself, he thought of standing by the commitment he had made.
    But then she said: “I won’t have any regrets. I’ll never have any regrets. But I’m not that sort of woman. It can’t last. Didn’t you say so yourself?”
    She was still half numb from the liquor.
    “It’s not my fault. It’s yours. You lost. You’re the weak one. Not I.” She ran on almost in a trance, and she bit at her sleeve as if to fight back the happiness.
    She was quiet for a time, apparently drained of feeling. Then, as if the thought came to her from somewhere in her memory, she struck out: “You’re laughing, aren’t you? You’re laughing at me.”
    “I am not.”
    “Deep in your heart you’re laughing at me. Even if you aren’t now, you will be later.” She was choked with tears. Turning away from him, she buried her face in her hands.
    But a moment later she was calm again. Soft and yielding as if she were offering herself up, she was suddenly very intimate, and she began telling him all about herself. She seemed quite to have forgotten the headache. She said not a word about what had just happened.
    “But I’ve been so busy talking I haven’t noticed how late it is.” She smiled a little bashfully. She had to leave before daylight, she said. “It’s still dark. But people here get up early.” Time after time she got up to look out the window. “They won’t be able to see my face yet. And it’s raining. No one will be going out to the fields this morning.”
    She seemed reluctant to go even when the lines of the mountain and of the roofs on its slopes were floating out of the rain. Finally it was time for the hotel maids to be up and about. She retouched her hair and ran, almost fled, from the room, brushing aside Shimamura’s offer to see her to the door. Someone might catch a glimpse of the two of them together.
    Shimamura went back to Tokyo that day.
• • •
    “You remember what you said then? But you were wrong. Why else would anyone come to such a place in December? I wasn’t laughing at you.”
    The woman raised her head. Her face where it had been pressed against Shimamura’s hand was red under the thick powder, from the eye across the bridge of the nose. It made him think of the snow-country cold, and yet, because of the darkness of her hair, there was a certain warmth in it.
    She smiled quietly, as though dazzled by a bright light. Perhaps, as she smiled, she thought of “then,” and Shimamura’s words gradually colored her whole body. When she bowed her head, a little stiffly, he could see that even her back under her kimono was flushed a deep red. Set off by the color of her hair, the moist sensuous skin was as if laid naked before him. Her hair could not really have been called thick. Stiff like a man’s, and swept up into a high Japanese-style coiffure with not a hair out of place, it glowed like some heavy black stone.
    Shimamura looked at the hair and wondered whether the coldness that had so startled him—he had never touched such cold hair, he said—might be less the cold of the snow-country winter than something in the hair itself. The woman began counting on her fingers. For some time she counted on.
    “What are you counting?” he asked. Still the counting continued.
    “It was the twenty-third of May.”
    “You’re