‘Cold Enough for Snow’ by Jessica Au   (2022) – 95 pages

Instead of a heavy-duty plot or unusual characters, the novella ‘Cold Enough for Snow’ flows from subject to subject like a stream. It has a quiet strength which requires attention.

A grown-up daughter has taken her mother on a sightseeing and shopping trip to Tokyo, Japan. As well as this elliptical mysterious story of a daughter and her mother, we get views of and insights into some of the major tourist places within and near Tokyo. It saved me an airplane ticket. Japan has an atmosphere all its own, and here we get meticulous descriptions of some of its features.

Inside a beautiful church they are touring, the daughter asks her mother a question.

“I asked my mother what she believed about the soul, and she thought for a moment. Then looking not at me, but at the hard white light before us, she said that she believed we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting”.

Here is an example of the kind of quiet wisdom you will find in ‘Cold Enough for Snow’ if you pay attention.

“I thought of how, at the bathhouse, the babies and younger children had clung to their mothers as they bathed them, tipping water over their heads while holding up a hand to protect their eyes, how they did not feel separated from each other yet, but rather still part of the same body, the same spirit. There was a time when my sister and I would have felt the same.”

Mother and little child, “how they did not feel separated from each other yet, but rather still part of the same body, the same spirit”. Priceless, and something I had never considered before, and I very well could have missed it.

Other times I got impatient with some of the lengthy descriptions that did not advance the plot, whatever there is of a plot.

There is an enigma between the daughter and her mother throughout this novella which is never fully explicated, which is probably a good thing.

Grade:   B