Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au ( New Directions)

A dream you can’t quite remember, a path you know well that’s suddenly hidden by fog, a glimpse of a person you think you recognize who turns out to be a stranger--this is the disorientation that comes when reading this slender little book. Is it a mystery, a ghost story, jagged bits of travel memories transformed into a novella? 

A daughter and mother float through an enigmatic sojourn in Japan, together but barely connecting. They are ageless and unnamed, each born into a different language and each living in separate places that go unidentified. The mother carries memories of an early life in Hong Kong, one  that she left long ago and has shown to her daughter through fading photos and fragmented stories. The daughter offers her own fragments, using bits of her education to explain things her mother never learned.

But are the two of them really there, together? A hotel clerk insists only one person occupies the room that the daughter and mother share. The mother, after the two spend a day apart, walks toward her daughter as if she were approaching a “ghost she did not want to meet,” her breath released “in a little cloud, like a small departing spirit.” 

“It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated.” This feeling pervades the entire book, filled as it is with the familiar and the disembodied, “halfway between a cliche and the truth.” Slowly the distance between the mother and daughter becomes a visible chasm, their lives so divergent that there’s no middle ground. As the novel unfolds, the daughter takes shape through her stream-of-consciousness memories, while the mother “might as well have been an apparition.” Perhaps she is. The pain of that possibility is never enlarged upon.

Instead readers are whisked along in a strange journey, one that’s so devoid of emotion that it’s almost numb but with intense and vivid sensory details that come as a constant surprise. “A strong, deliberate wind,” the taste of green tea ice cream that’s “bitter and pleasant,” a lake set within a crater, “uncanny and almost artificial,” persimmons lying “on the ground in a sweet pulp,” are alive and real, with the evocative precision that is usually found only in a poem. The story in its formlessness becomes inclusive, enveloping readers in a world that becomes their own, wrapping them in its avoidance of pain and its fluid impressionistic images.

Writing,” the daughter tells her mother, is “the only way one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been…” As she travels with someone who may not be there, making things as she wished they had been, she offers a space in which others can travel in their own way, with their own companion, “as we wished they had been.”

With the delicate tenacity and strength of a cobweb, Cold Enough for Snow lingers after it’s been read, teasing and tugging, calling for explorations of  its puzzling beauty just one more time. Its sentences carry the weight and comfort of a freshly washed blanket, “fragrant and thick.” in a meditative quest into what’s real, what’s imagined, and how the two realms overlap.~Janet Brown