‘Cold Enough for Snow’: A meditation on the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships

Little of importance actually happens in “Cold Enough for Snow,” in which a mother and her adult daughter vacation in Japan during the typhoon season. Through the daughter’s narration, we follow the pair to museums, bookstores, restaurants and souvenir shops. Their largely one-sided conversations are interspersed with the narrator’s recollections of various people in her life: her uncle in Hong Kong; her partner, Laurie; her sister; a university lecturer.

In the hands of a less talented writer, this subdued plot could have been stultifying. Fortunately, this isn’t the case for Australian writer Jessica Au. Her second novel, “Cold Enough for Snow,” is a slender volume, but this restraint is an excellent argument for more tightly-written novellas over bloated bestsellers.

Cold Enough for Snow, by Jessica Au
144 pages
NEW DIRECTIONS

Au’s precise, balletic prose draws the reader into a dreamlike vision of Japan; an unerring eye for detail illuminates her characters’ otherwise mundane activities. The narrator observes her surroundings with a poet’s gaze: hanging textiles running “over the floor like frozen water,” still-open shops “glowing like the light from a small house in a valley.” All this beauty is available, she seems to suggest, “if you cared enough to notice.”

At the same time, Au has a gift for evoking a sense of place by leaving much to the reader’s imagination: Nothing is specifically named beyond cities and a scant few landmarks. The traveling pair stay in “one of the city’s busiest districts,” ride the trains and walk through parks, but we never know exactly where these places are. Coupled with the narrator’s constant ambivalence and uncertainty, the result is unsettling and spectral, not unlike the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro or Rachel Cusk.

It’s established early on that mother and daughter have a nebulous relationship. We don’t know why, and both mother and daughter seem equally unwilling to address this directly; the primary impetus for this vacation involves reasons the narrator “could not yet name.” Much like a stranger sharing their most intimate thoughts but nothing of their daily life, we learn much about the narrator — for example, her preoccupations and love of Greek myths — yet little of her on a basic level.

The narrator tries, over and over again, to connect with her mother. They talk about art, horoscopes and family, but the silences loom louder. The narrator often recalls something she “really wanted to say” and decides to say nothing. Her mother offers mostly surface-level responses to her daughter. There’s a very human desire for connection — the narrator wants to “know someone and have them know me” — and yet she seems to fear direct confrontation, which many readers will likely find familiar.

Full of musings about art, memory, relationships and the human condition, “Cold Enough for Snow” is in some ways a writer’s book, a pleasure to read as much for insight as for beautiful prose. Despite its bare-bones plot, the book touches on many themes, making it difficult to summarize. If it’s about anything, it’s about the various ways we try — and fail — to know one another. Like real life, there are no easy answers or conclusions.