she had never seen. She saw villages lined with small grass-roofed houses, small towns strewn with sasanqua blossoms, and big cities crowded with factories. But no one noticed the rabbits and the girl. “Oh, it’s the first snow of winter,” people mumbled and hurried away.
As she hopped, the girl tried to chant the charm, but her voice was drowned out by the rabbits’ song.
The girl’s limbs were numb with cold, as cold as ice. Her cheeks turned pale, and her lips quivered.
“Grandmother, help!” she thought. Then she hopped into a ring and found a leaf. She picked it up and saw it was a mugwort leaf, bright green. On the back, it had fluffy white hairs.
“Oh! Who dropped this for me?” the girl thought. She held the mugwort leaf to her chest. Then she felt someone cheering for her. She felt many small creatures rooting for her.
She could hear the voices of seeds under the snow, breathing, enduring the cold beneath the ground.
A wonderful riddle came into her mind. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and cried, “Why is the back of a mugwort leaf so white?”
Hearing this, the rabbit ahead of her tottered. He stopped singing and turned around. “The back of a mugwort leaf?” he said.
“I wonder why?” said the rabbit behind her, stumbling. The rabbits’ singing broke off, and their pace slowed down.
Seizing the moment, the girl said, “That’s easy. It’s rabbit fur. Rabbits roll around in the field and shed their hair on mugwort leaves.”
“Yes, you’re right!” said the rabbits, delighted. They started singing a new song:
Then the girl thought she smelled the fragrance of flowers in the air. She heard the chirping of small birds. She imagined herself hopscotching in a mugwort field, bathed in the spring sun. Her cheeks turned rosy. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and shouted, “Mugwort, mugwort, mugwort in spring!”
When she opened her eyes, she was hopping alone along a strange path in a strange town. She saw no rabbits ahead or behind. Snow flurried. The hopscotch rings were no longer on the path, and the mugwort leaf was gone from her hand.
“Ah, I’m safe,” the girl thought. But she couldn’t take another step.
A crowd of strangers gathered around her and asked for her name and address. When she told them the name of her village, they looked at each other, muttering, “I can’t believe it.” They didn’t think a child could have walked from such a faraway place beyond many mountains. Then an old woman said, “She must have been led away by rabbits.”
The townspeople fed the girl warm food and put her on a bus home before dark.
— Translated from the Japanese by Toshiya Kamei
“First Day of Snow” borrows elements from different folktales about disappearance. In Japanese tradition, the mysterious disappearance of a person is often attributed to an angry deity. This is called kamikakushi, or “hidden by gods.” There are many tales in which this motif appears. The girl in “First Day of Snow” is almost spirited away. You might recognize this motif from the anime film Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Rabbits also play an important role in Japanese mythology. They live on the moon and make mochi (sticky rice cake). In “The White Rabbit of Inaba,” a rabbit deity tells the fortune of Okuninushi, who is treated like a slave by his brothers. This is a lovely story, full of the delicacy and mystery of the fairy-tale tradition.
HIROMI ITO. I Am Anjuhimeko
I AM ANJUHIMEKO, THREE YEARS OLD.
In stories, it seems to me the person they refer to as father usually wasn’t around or was absence itself, no matter what story I happened to hear, the person called father would be dead in the house or out somewhere traveling or listening to whatever the stepmother was telling him to do, but in my house, there is someone called father, and he is intent on killing me, he is always doing his best to do so, but I don’t know what to do, I’ve had nothing but hardship since I was born.
My father said this baby’s mouth is so monstrously big it seems to stretch all the way to her ears, her eyelids have folds in them, her face is flat, she’s got moles and birthmarks all over, her ears are big, big, big, something is wrong with her, it’s like she’s the freakish baby of some old priest, no way she’s mine, no way, I’ll call her Anjuhimeko, after those Anju — those lowly priests living in little cells for hermits — that’s what I’ll call her, and I’ll bury her in the sand, and if she can survive for three years then she can be my child.
Something’s the matter with me, he says, look, I was born and here I am now, who cares if I’ve got one or two heads, who cares if I’ve got one or two hands, one too few or one too many? none of that really matters anyway, but that’s not what father says, he says let’s try burying her in the sand and waiting for three years, mother was willing to just go along with that, that was a big disappointment, but, well, here’s the problem, I’m just a newborn who can’t even see, and I can’t even utter a word to talk back, so I was wrapped in my mother’s silk underclothes and buried in a sandy spot near a river.
Speaking of which, the sandy place near the river is the place where everybody buries their babies.
To both the right and left of the place I was buried, there were so many buried babies that they jostled against one another, some were breathing, some weren’t, some had struggled partway out of the sand and then dried up, some had managed to escape all the way out of the sand and crawl away.
Just crawl a little bit and there is a big bush, mosquitoes and flies sting any baby who tries to get there, but if they are able to escape from the fierce sun and take shelter from the rain and wind, they can pluck grass or leaves to eat, and if they manage to make it to the river, they can just go right in and live in the water, even though I was still buried in the sand, I watched the others around me, I watched the babies as they died, the ones who were already dead, and the ones who managed to survive and get away.
That’s right, how could anyone possibly have karma as bad as mine?
In only three years I gave birth to three children, but my husband buried one of the babies I’d gone to all the trouble to bear, he buried her in the sand, and now my swollen breasts are too much to bear, the holes in my breast where the milk should come out are plugged up, feverish, and swollen, just a simple touch and my breasts hurt so badly I think they’ll rip open, but between the pain in my breast and the sorrow at having my child buried, I spend every day weeping from dawn to dusk, and in the process of all this weeping, I have ruined my eyes, when that happened my husband said to me he didn’t want me in the house any longer because I’d gone blind, you’re the one who gave birth to the baby that wasn’t fit for anything except burial, no doubt you’ve got something deep and dark in your karmic past that made you give birth to that child and made you go blind, if you stay here, your deep, dark karma will rub off on me, so before that happens, do me the favor of dying or at least getting the hell out of the
