He had read Snow Country long ago one Arctic summer in Pond Inlet when people were hunting narwhals. Pond Inlet lies considerably north of Churchill, and the landscape is different. East of the dump, perhaps a thousand paces from shore, a stream wound through a rich bed of moss. If you walked up this green S-shaped valley you reached a triangular arroyo whose walls hid ice and waterfalls. Above, climbing the black-lichened steps of these white and orange cliffs, you reached a green ridge that looked down on the sea where a Ski-Doo slid bravely along one of the last solid spans of ice and the sun was long and white on Bylot Island. A shot sounded. Water trickled down beneath banks of dirty snow (which resembled the black-lichened white rocks). Listening to the splashes of the dying animal, he remembered the book's first sentence, variously translated as: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country and After the long border tunnel, the snow country appeared. It reminded him of that Faulkner sentence Soon now they would enter the delta. Snow Country is a hundred and seventy-five pages long, and its palm-of-the-hand reduction a mere eleven, yet old Kawabata, who they say was shy and wise and lonely and who gassed himself, not long after receiving his Nobel Prize, kept this sentence even in the shorter version. It was the backbone of the world he must miniaturize. The train emerged from the long border tunnel into the snow country. The snow country was for Kawabata's protagonist the end of this world and the beginning of another, the country of pure mountains of sunset crystal which all tunnels are supposed to lead to, the zone of that uncanny whiteness hymned by Poe and Melville, the pole of transcendence. But on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, although it was snowing outside and there had been a tunnel, ladies sat reading glamour magazines or drinking piping hot canned tea, while businessmen dozed or fuddled over their papers. No one had been transcended. The snow country was to the north, but they were going west. Yuki said that the snow country had been grossly developed since Kawabata's time. (Yuki was the traveller's wife.) She said that it would be difficult to find sensitively decaying geishas in the hot springs now. He looked out the window and everything was ugly, dreary and clean. Now they passed Mount Fuji's broad paleness. Yuki's father had taken her there when she was five. Her father had put her on a horse when she got tired. It had been summer season, and so beautiful, she said. The top half of the mountain had refracted a special purple color into her soul. He gazed at Fuji's dull snow far above so many dull white apartments and could not see any beauty. The train was born from the lengthy border tunnel; it came into the snow country. Behind Yuki, a man in a silk suit gaped his lips blackly, the lower side of his mouth sagging from right to left. He looked dead. It was too warm in the car although outside it was very cold. The tiny old conductor, whose cap seemed larger than his head, pigeon-toed his slow and pensive way up the aisle. A girl in a sky-blue miniskirt passed, offering a tray of cartons which could have been anything from yogurt to wine. Now they flashed in and out of so many hollowed-out mountains and it was snowing but they were not and would never be in the snow country. From the long border tunnel the train came out into the snow country. There was no border, no special world. Ahead grew more swarms of houses and factories. Fuji was getting closer while she slept. The lower part of Fuji was grayish-green; it could have been the base of a cinder cone in the American west. Smokestacks offered their gruesome twisting homage. Then the train was past. Later they rushed through a snowstorm and it was lovely and white on greenish mountains and raindrops crawled sideways on the windows. In Pond Inlet the stream glowed mirror-like in the moss, and the mosquitoes swarmed. It was almost windless. The evening was the wannest time. Mosquitoes straddled his chin and knees and fingers; when he slapped one he killed three. Dead mosquitoes smeared his clothes. — In the sun's tail, floes glowed coolly. The Ski-Doo had stopped in a glowing yellow place, and presently the shot sounded. But now the stream was frozen and covered with snow, the mosquitoes were all dead, the narwhals were gone for the year, and the solid ice was back. From the long tunnel the train pulled out, across the border into the snow country. He remembered the strange, richly chilly colors which Kawabata's lovers, so distant from themselves and each other, saw through the frosted windows of the snow country. Life lay outside the windows; it throve only where the sunset's rays struck snowdrifts, everywhere nowhere everywhere. — He got off the train.
