Cold Enough for Snow, a novella by Jessica Au, has a quiet magnetism that rewards the reader with an intimate view of the relationship between the unnamed first person narrator and her mother. They travel through Japan together, visiting Tokyo and Kyoto over the course of what feels like a couple of weeks. The mother is happy to follow the daughter's itinerary which takes them to major attractions in both cities. Each chapter begins in the present time of the trip, and then, in a seamless manner, opens up to a memory. In this way, each place in the present serves as a jumping off point to dive into the past. The result is that as the two women move about this country they don't know very well, the narrator reflects on important moments in her life.
When she goes off on her own, leaving her mother in Kyoto, she recalls the way she and her partner, Laurie, combined households and started living together. After a long walk through a forest and an overnight stay at a country inn, she makes use of a bath house in the woods where she is the only bather. There, she recalls a trip she and Laurie took to visit his father:
"In April, we'd gone to visit Laurie's father, flying up north first and then renting a small, bright yellow car and driving for several hours. It had been near the end of the wet season, and everything was lush and green. I looked out the window at the flat roads and the low hills and the great, stormy skies, fascinated to see the landscape Laurie had grown up in, and which must have been, in some way, a part of him still. Laurie, I knew, was both happy and unhappy to be back in the place he had left as a teenager, and for some reason I felt like I was seeing something private, as if he were suddenly a boy again, and I was looking at a part of him that he had long ago abandoned…We stopped at a large lake which seemed to be an almost perfect circle. Laurie explained that the lake had been formed by a crater, and that no one knew how deep it really was" (71-2).
Details that might seem mundane or unimportant, like the bright yellow car or the perfectly circular lake, do the work of allowing me to enter her experience. Here, as everywhere in this peaceful story, emotion is subdued and ambiguous, as in, "He was both happy and unhappy to be at his childhood home." Problems, if noted, are evanescent and tension seems entirely absent. Happiness is acknowledged but not lingered over and the effect of such overall restraint is a calming, meditative tone. Very little happens in Cold Enough for Snow, yet I never lost interest. Death, illness, all the unpleasantness of life is referenced only obliquely, as in, "No one knows how deep the lake is," a fact that suggests life's many mysteries. Later, when our narrator reflects that one day, she and her sister will be going through their mother's belongings, deciding what to keep, what to give away, and what to throw out I understand that the purpose of the trip is to be with her mother before the inevitable takes her away.
During the visit to Laurie's birthplace, his father takes the narrator to his studio and after describing how he explains his sculptural process she confesses, "I had wanted to ask more, to probe deeper, but somehow I couldn't think of how to phrase what I wanted to know and so let the moment pass" (75). Regret, so ubiquitous in life and in most other fiction, is absent here. I was certain that the shared circumstance of the trip to Japan with her mother would present opportunities for something painful or secretive to emerge, but when the narrator tells me, "We had said, it seemed, so little of substance to each other these past weeks. The trip was nearly ending, and it had not done what I had wanted it to" (88), I assumed she was referring to a desire to know more about her inscrutably calm mother, but what she meant is that she could see how their easy companionship made her mother happy.
It's rare to encounter such overall peacefulness in a novel. While waiting at the station for the train to take her back to Kyoto, the narrator tells me, "After a while I was no longer cold, but only very tired. I had the vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them" (86).
It's a quiet epiphany, and I found it profound and surprisingly moving. As the daughter travels both forwards through Japan and backwards through memory, the details of her experience are the way she sees and holds. With mostly reported dialog, an overall lack of tension or raw, jagged emotion, the story shouldn't engage, yet, surprisingly, it does. I believe it's the emphasis on the mundane that makes it both moving and powerful.
Cold Enough for Snow won the inaugural Novel Prize and was published simultaneously by three publishers in the English speaking world: New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia).
Au, Jessica. Cold Enough for Snow. New York: New Directions, 2022.
Filed under: Preparing for the extraordinary by invoking the mundane