Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au: book review

Cold Enough for Snow (2022) is set in Tokyo, Japan.

The narrator is visiting Tokyo on holiday with her mother who lives in Hong Kong. She hadn’t seen her mother in a long time, and it was time to reconnect.

Mother and daughter visit cultural sites, such as museums and art galleries, food halls and restaurants, shops and department stores, and parks and gardens. Even a cemetery with bare cherry trees.

They talk about the architecture and iconic Japanese images. They talk about the narrator’s husband Laurie and that they are considering having children. Her mother thinks they should.

The cold is not only a reference to the weather, but to the relationship of the two women. They talk of events and art, but not feelings and emotions. They are polite in their conversations, but not warm in their hearts.

A question her mother asks the narrator is whether it is cold enough for snow.

The first thing I noticed about the novel is the stark lack of dialogue. It is full of ‘small talk’ that is implied and written about in the third person. There is an unexpressed love between the mother and daughter yet no deep understanding of each other. The distance between them is not merely geographical, generational, and cultural, but also verbal – the mother’s first language is Cantonese and the narrator’s is English.

The novel is deceptively simple and quiet, with substance that is layered, intricate, delicate, and thought-provoking.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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