Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica AU
Australian fiction
Source – Personal copy
As many of you know, I tend to avoid Hype books, in fact, I hate how the whole of book reviewing in papers and end-of-year lists tends to orbit the same list of books; now, this is a book on the edge of that list. I was drawn to it as it is from Fitzcarradlo, but they are very popular these days.It is also set in Tokyo, which is the one place in the world I would love to go and spend some time. I just love watching YouTube videos of the city. It seems like a fantastic place. So this book follows a mother and daughter as they meet and wander the city.
That night, we went to a restaurant, in a tiny little street near the railway line. I took us by a route along the canal, which I thought might be nice at that time of evening.
The buildings around us were dark and the trees dark and quiet. Plants grew on the steep walls of the canal, trailing downwards, and the water gave a shaking, delicate impression of the world above. Along the street, the restaurants and cafés had turned on only low, dim lights, like lanterns. Though we were in the middle of the city, it was like being in a village. This was one of the experiences I liked most about Japan, and, like so many things, it was halfway between a cliché and the truth. It’s beautiful, I said, and my mother smiled but it was impossible to tell if she agreed.
One of the first nights out
The book follows a few days in which an unnamed mother and daughter have chosen Tokyo, a place new to them both, to reconnect. I was reminded of the previous series as the pair wandered the city, calling in on cafe art exhibitions as the talk drifted over them into the present and to the past. We saw this in the later films of the Before series of films, how we connect in the present, make echoes, and recall the past. From here, Monet’s art sparks memories in the mother and leads the daughter to her past. This is a book where nothing much happens, but that reminds me of what I love in great cinema, the films it is about the moments, and this is that sort of book, the connection between the two. That connection you have with family where it is about being connected by blood and how that can lead to ups and downs. An ode to the city and trying to reconnect with the past.
The lecturer had said that I was welcome to have people over and so during the middle of the stay, I asked my sister and some of my classmates to come. I cooked several dishes that I had already made from the cook-books, and brought these out to the big wooden table in the garden. During the lunch – perhaps because the day was beautiful and the orchard peaceful, and perhaps also because we were all young, drinking and talking and laughing, and because I had tied my hair back with a scarf as blue as the cobalt of Delft tableware – I had again the sensation of seeing us like a still in a film, or a photograph, and the feeling was paired with another one of satisfaction, and rightness. In the kitchen, I found several small blue and white bowls, much like the ones that we had in our house, with a decorative border around the rim and what looked like translucent grains of rice arranged in a flowerlike pattern around the sides. I used these to serve the sweet-savoury Cantonese dessert I had made, which was a recipe of my mother’s, the only one of hers I had cooked during my stay.
A memory of the daughters this caught my eye as my dad has lots of blue and white house KLM used give away as well as some actual delft
This book has been so well reviewed that my personal thoughts on it aren’t going to add anything to it. But as I said, it is crying out to be made into a film . Like I said above, it has what makes an excellent film for me: a slice of time where the actual events of the day aren’t the story. It is the connection, the past, the memories. The Before series or even past Loves I watched earlier in the week, even going back as far as something like Tokyo story, which again had parents trying to reconnect to children. This is that for the modern age. The backdrop of cafes, shops, and art exhibitions makes Tokyop itself a character. A slow story of reconnecting told in one of the fastest cities in the world. I hope it is picked up and made into a film it would be perfect. Have you ever read a book and thought of it as a film as you were reading it ?
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