Yoko and the Snow – Part One

“The roof burned out:
Now
I can see the moon.”
(Mizuta Masahide, 1657 – 1723)

Shibu Onsen. ©Chihiro Matsumoto

My name is Yoko, and I love snow.

What I like most is the contrast between the crackling noise – like dry leaves – of the shoe sinking into the fresh snow and the muffled sound of flakes crashing on the umbrella.

I much prefer the latter.

In the silence of the evening, in the empty streets, beyond the lapping of the flow of the Yokoyugawa river, there is only the faint dusting of the snow.

Sometimes I hold my breath to just hear that sound.

With the nose up, under the cone of the street lamps, I love to observe all those white wads passing from the darkness of the night to the electric light, flying without ever touching each other, and then disappearing back into the black until they rest on the railings, on the ground, on tree branches.

They are just like me.

I see myself in one of the thousands of flakes that from the light of the streetlamp crosses the limit and disappears in the darkness of the night.

I too fell in the night, in this small thermal prefecture, almost by chance, without any noise.

 

Shibu Onsen. ©Chihiro Matsumoto

I walk different roads every night to get home.

I seem to be the only inhabitant of this place in winter.

Everyone prefers to stay warm in their homes in December, in the cold of 4° and the snow that never ceases to fall for months. Or in one of the nine sotoyu*, with hot, steaming water up to the nose and ears, more like stones than humans.

In the summer months, there is more movement: tourists and businessmen who come from Tokyo and other big cities to relieve stress in public baths. The small cobbled streets, with orange or gray stones, resonate with the ticking of the geta*, and the white SUVs are parked at the foot of the ryokan*, with that bizarre mixture of modern and ancient that is the sign of Shibu Onsen.

I much prefer the winter months.

The silence and the snow.

Where everything is white, soft, silent.

Even the drops that fall from the silver tips of the vertical stalactites from the roofs and verandas make no sound.

Everything disappears without a voice.

 

Source: Virtual Japan (YouTube)

My name is Yoko and I am 34 years old.

For many, I am a yonige*. Or a johatsu*, an “evaporated” one.

And that's actually what I am.

Without the need to contact one of the many “Nighttime Movers Companies”, one afternoon I packed some clothes and some books in my suitcase, I took the train and after three hours I got off at the last stop of Dentetsu-Nagano, at the Yudanaka station. From there I took a local bus and with a 210 yen ticket and in five minutes I left my whole life behind.

Just like I saw in that late nineties show, “Flight by Night”.

I don't even know why I chose Nagano in particular; perhaps because as a child my grandmother told me that she loved going to the thermal baths, after having attended the Nagano Gion Festival*, in the Zenko-ji temple, and prayed for her health; she told me of that silence, of the cherry trees in March and of the snow in the winter months. She still had the nine Shibu Onsen sotayu stamps.

So when I was sad, in the Tokyo apartment, I imagined walking through those streets with a white yukata* and grandma's geta.

Luckily, she died before I chose to disappear.

Now I rarely go back to Tokyo, there is no longer any reason.

If I travel, I choose nature, the Zenko-ji temple, the “Park of the snow monkeys”, just ten minutes by bus from Shibu Onsen.

Anyway, from the station I prefer to walk twenty minutes on foot rather than take the bus.

Someone here thinks I'm allergic to people.

It's not true.

In the afternoon I like to eat ramen in a place overlooking the street, from whose windows you can see the bridge that crosses the river.

The hot steam of the ramen whitens the glass and everything tarnishes, as the day gives way to the evening and the defined shapes become moist spots of color. At five o'clock it is already dark, in December – the blue tinges the vertical alleys that the drops left on the glass.

It always reminds me of that film by that Polish director, I never get the name, where everything was blue. Then those dramatic strings and female voices exploded with an ethereal song.*

I believe everyone has the soundtrack they deserve.

There is no tragedy in my life, but only this pop song that skips with its rhythm from the restaurant's television.

“Warui no wa dare da...”

Just funny: “Whose fault is it?”

“Dare no sei de mo nai...”

And yes, it's nobody's fault.

Here I find myself drumming my fingers on the wood of the table with my head swaying following the rhythm like a teenager.

But what a symphony of strings and blue tears!

“...Sayonara to tomo ni owaru dake na n da...”

“It's just that we will end, together with a goodbye”

Yes, yes, what a funny song.

This ramen is really good…

 

Shibu Onsen. ©Chihiro Matsumoto

My name is Yoko and I cheated on my husband.

For this reason, one day I left the house where I lived and found myself waiting to finish this existence in Shibu Onsen.

To be fair, he betrayed me earlier. Maybe because I couldn't give him a child.

After the first happy years of marriage, frustration set in.

Our apartment, which at first seemed large and welcoming to the children who would arrive, then became too wide and in two the solitude multiplied as in a hall of mirrors.

My husband didn't want to do the tests to find out if he was the cause: he just started accusing me of being the sterile one.

It wasn't hard to uncover his betrayals.

It's now impossible to hide things: everything is on our phones.

I didn't make a big deal out of it.

Indeed, I almost pity him.

But in the end, I also cheated on him.

If someone asked me the reason, I would not know what to answer.

Maybe I betrayed him as a matter of symmetry.

I love symmetry: chopsticks on the table, slippers, love, and hate...

Like the bamboo fountain in the gardens where the water flowing and falling into the tub makes the bamboo sway, in a perpetual way, one side and the other, with that wonderful sound. Tok... Tok...

It was a betrayal without passion, without feeling.

A simple balancing of our married life.

Maybe we would even be able to carry on our lives to old age and he, maybe even carry me around on his back like that old photograph of Takeyoshi Tanuma from 1955 that my father had framed at home when I was a child.

I was saying that maybe we would even be able to carry on with our lives. Each with their own masks.

But I preferred to put my things in a suitcase and disappear.

As many do.

To have a second chance before fatigue wears me off.

Or before, one morning, I was the one to wake up in an empty bed forever. Without a message.

In the end, I think, I was simply faster.

Without tears, without regrets.

 

“Man carrying his wife”. Asakusa, Tokyo, 1955. ©Takeyoshi Tanuma

TO BE CONTINUED...

*Sotoyu, are the public thermal baths. There are nine in Shibu Onsen.
*Geta are the traditional wooden sandals.
*Ryokans are Japanese-style inns that are up to 400 years old.
*Yonige is a Japanese term formed by yo (night) and nige (to flee), which means a discreet escape towards disappearance.
Jouhatsu (Japanese: 蒸発, Hepburn: Jōhatsu, lit. “evaporation”) or johatsu refers to the people in Japan who, every year, nearly one hundred thousand purposely vanish from their established lives without a trace.
*The Gion festival is a celebration where people dedicate their prayers to calming down the god of storms. It has a long history, originating from the Yasaka-shrine in Kyoto around the 10th century. The Gion festival rituals are widely spread in Japan, and Nagano Gion Festival (ながの祇園祭) is one of the biggest.
The festival takes place on the second Sunday of July every year at Zenkoji-temple, lasting for the entire day from 8 am to 17 pm. The festival generally consists of various traditional events and performances, as well as many food stands and galleries. The main part of the festival is “Yatai-Jyungo,” meaning “a big tour to the temple.” The Yatai-Jyungo is a carnival in Japanese traditional style with long lines of stall cars prepared and decorated by local communities, with geisha performances on the stalled car dancing in tune with Japanese instruments.
Each vehicle is pulled along the road by human force to the Zenko-ji Temple where the people dedicate their wish to the gods for peace and good health.
*Yukata is the light cotton kimono.
*The film is Krzysztof Kieslowski's “Three Colors – Film Blue” (1993).

Italian version