The Snow Fox: A Novel - Hardcover

Why read a historical novel about Japan by a Brooklyn-born Chicago academic when Japan's literature teems with novels and historical chronicles of its own? Why not just settle for the real thing?

The short answer is that The Snow Fox turns out to be a spare, subtle, moving love story that builds and sustains its own utterly believable world. And there's a bonus: Despite the cross-cultural leap entailed, that world feels Japanese to its core. Schaeffer's tale of a brooding warlord and a beautiful poet is first and foremost a work of imagination; look to it for traditional literary pleasures rather than for an accurate portrait of feudal Japan. And yet it could be set in no other country -- not because it is full of kimono-clad ladies with six-foot-long hair and fearsome samurai in horns and loincloths (although it is), but because it is infused with that peculiarly Japanese quality of quick-witted, almost self-mocking melancholy.

Donald Keene tells a story about the demands of translating Japanese, with its dislike of pronouns and its vagueness about things like singular and plural, definite and indefinite, into English. "When I was translating Midori iro no sutokkingu by Abe Kobo," he writes, "I asked [Abe] whether this should be The Green Stocking or The Green Stockings, but he only smiled and commented that this was my problem, not his." Schaeffer clearly knows enough Japanese to have picked up that beguiling indifference to precision; it is everywhere in The Snow Fox, not just as a matter of grammar but as a philosophical attitude and a narrative procedure.

"Matsuhito remembered Lady Utsu's polished metal mirror, and how, when you looked into it, only one small part of the oval remained in focus. Everything else distorted or vanished. . . . Lady Utsu feared her mirror. 'Suppose it truly reflects the world as it is?' she asked him. 'Then it is a terrible world.'

" 'It is only a mirror,' said Matsuhito."

Just so, in the world of this novel, "reality" comes in and out of focus like Mount Fuji vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. It is not clear even to the characters who people are or where they came from; much of the time, it is not clear whether a speaker is dead or alive. Such boundaries, as Abe might have said, are the reader's problem, not the storyteller's. By the same token, as one of the multiple narrators observes, "It does not matter where you begin a story, or in what sequence you tell it -- provided you get to the end, even if that end is the smoke sent up by a funeral pyre."

Such blithe vagueness doesn't make for easy reading; I found myself flipping back to the start more than once to get a grip on the plot and later growing impatient with a story that seemed to be going in circles, or nowhere. But stay with it: Its hold tightens.

Schaeffer has said that the jumping-off point for The Snow Fox was Akira Kurosawa's film "The Seven Samurai," which is set at the height of the Sengoku Jidai, or Era of the Warring States -- the long, lawless period between the collapse of the Heian golden age at the end of the 12th century and the rise of the great shoguns some 400 years later. "I began to wonder," Schaeffer says of the movie, "what happened to the head samurai after he had helped save the peasant village from marauding bandits. . . . I wanted to know what happened after the film ended."

Several years of research later, she had learned enough to shy away from Kurosawa's immediate territory. And so she set her story a couple of centuries earlier -- although the precise time frame is fuzzy -- after the sun has set on Heian and at the dawn of the Sengoku Jidai. She imagined a samurai, Matsuhito, and his relationships with two redoubtable figures: Lord Norimasa, a warlord who adopts him and with whom he battles to restore order to the country, and Lady Utsu, a beautiful poet and Lord Norimasa's ward, with lips "like blood on snow" and a reputation for coldness toward men. Except, of course, toward Matsuhito, who becomes her lover before the two are separated by wars and other turbulence. Only decades later do they find each other -- and a brief, fragile happiness -- in the woods of the northern snow country, where they live with their alter egos, a pair of foxes. And then . . . the funeral pyres.

Kurosawa's village, obviously, has receded. In this landscape, a village is useful mainly for Lord Norimasa to torch when he needs light for a battle. Taking turns in the foreground instead are the walled world of the court aristocracy, which lives on, perpetuating the old traditions, while the social order crumbles around it; the lurid world of war; and the natural world, symbolizing transience, "like a beautiful scene painted on silk after it has faded." All are superbly realized.

The character of Lady Utsu is based on Ono no Komachi, an actual poet at the 9th-century Heian court and later the subject of several Noh plays whose plots turn on her legendary cruelty to suitors. Several of those legends are woven into the fictional Lady Utsu's story. It is not clear why Schaeffer chose to telescope different historical periods in this way. Perhaps she felt she could hardly imagine a more mesmerizing character; perhaps she felt Komachi's real-life reputation for beauty, wit and elegance would heighten the Heian flavor of her violent feudal setting. (Not to be outdone, the publishers have put a very 19th-century-looking geisha on the jacket cover.)

Nevertheless, Lady Utsu is a memorable heroine: smart as a whip, cool, yet vulnerable -- well-matched with the shrewd but pensive Matsuhito. One of the best things in the novel is the deft back-and-forth of the pair's repartee. Despite the obligatory sadness and forays into melodrama, The Snow Fox can also be very amusing.

So, no, it's not The Tale of Genji, or even Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa's swashbuckling samurai novel. But I will say this: If you tackle either of those monuments of Japanese literature after reading The Snow Fox, there will be moments in which you can truthfully say, "Ah, yes, I've felt that, seen that, heard that note, before." Not bad for a foreigner.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Ward

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