Talking Big

I love this ethereal passage from Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (2022), a short (95 pages), compelling novel of a woman’s trip to Japan with her mother. This comes late in the book. The narrator and her mother have been traveling together in Japan for a couple of weeks, but this passage occurs as the narrator takes a day to herself to hike a mountain trail in the rain.

Soon, I had the left the road and was on the trail. In some places, the path was like a corridor, surrounded by trees on either side, tall and spirit-like, swaying around me as if to a sound I could not hear. The earth smelled cold and rich, like the bottom of a well, and the path wound steeply upward, wet and muddy in places. I passed by a river and two small waterfalls, who sound was almost indistinguishable from the rain. The water as it poured down the rocks was bright and white, like salt. I thought of nothing and no one. On a rock near my feet, there was a tiny frog, the same color as an autumn leaf. The trail continued to wind through a combination of of villages and mountains. I disappeared in and out of the forest like a character in a book. From a house high up on a hill, a medium-sized dog, its coloring somewhere between a fox and a coyote, with its tail curved upward, watched me go by. I thought of my mother, and how some day in the future, I would go with my sister to her apartment, the one I had never seen, with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away. I thought of all the things I would find there—private things like jewelry, photo albums and letters, but also signs of a careful and well-organized life: bills and receipts, phone numbers, an address book, the manual for the washing machine and dryer. In the bathroom, there would be half-used glass vials and jars of creams, signs of her daily rituals that she did not like anyone else to see. My sister, I knew, ever methodical, would suggest we sort things into piles: things to keep, things to donate, things to put in the trash. I would agree but, in the end, I knew I could keep nothing, whether out of too much or too little sentiment, I did not know.

Like many passages in this book, this one deftly changes registers. It begins with a the elusive tone of a poem (the spirit-like trees, a sound the narrator cannot hear, thoughts of nothing and no one, images of nature) and descends to the every day. We’re given many descriptions in the book of everyday objects. Bowls, socks, gloves. It’s Au’s great skill in moving in and out from her searching, ambiguous style to the modest and quiet descriptions of daily life that makes those everyday things seem almost haunted. The Library of Congress subjects listed at the front of the book say: “Mothers and daughters—Fiction” and “Domestic fiction—Novels.” The book is so much more than that. I recommend it to you.