In a village of Musashi Province, two woodcutters — an old man and his apprentice, a lad of eighteen — caught on the wrong side of a snowstorm at the river ferry. They sheltered in the boatman's hut: two mats, one door, no window, no fire. The old man fell asleep almost at once. The boy lay awake, listening to the snow slashing against the door, and at last slept too. Then the door came open. Not the wind's way. By snow-light he saw a woman all in white, and she bent over the old man and blew her breath upon him — a breath like bright white smoke — and when the boy put out his hand in the dark, the old man's face was ice. No wound, no sound, nothing to call a death. The cold took its payment the way water takes a coin.
Then she bent over the boy. Her face came down until it almost touched his, and he saw she was very beautiful, though her eyes made him afraid. She looked at him a while, and smiled, and spared him — the story says for his youth, a pretty boy of eighteen. She said: if you ever tell anybody, even your own mother, about what you have seen this night, I shall know it, and then I will kill you. Remember what I say. Note the listener she named. She could have said nothing, or said everyone. She named the mother, the person a frightened boy most wants to run to. She had read him in one look, and the condition she set was aimed at the exact door he would try.
The winter after, walking home, he overtook a girl on the road. Tall, slim, a voice like a song-bird, lately lost both parents, going to Yedo to poor relations who might find her a place as a servant. Her name was O-Yuki. Snow. He asked if she was betrothed; she said, laughingly, that she was free. He married her. And here the tale plants the detail and waits: children came, ten of them, all fair of skin, and the years ran by, and O-Yuki did not age. Not one line. Most peasant-women age early, the story says; O-Yuki looked as young and fresh as the day she first came to the village. The neighbors called her a wonderful person, different by nature. Different by nature is the folk word for what the neighbors cannot name.
One night, after the children were asleep, O-Yuki sewed by the light of a paper lamp, and her husband watched her, and the lamplight on her face did what lamplight on a beloved face does: it reached for the memory. He told her the bedtime story. The storm, the hut, the breath like white smoke, the woman all in white who killed the old man and spared him. And she heard him out, and rose, and screamed into his face: It was I, I, I! Yuki it was! I told you then I would kill you if you ever said one word about it! But for those children asleep there, I would kill you this moment! Take very, very good care of them; for if ever they have reason to complain of you, I will treat you as you deserve! And her voice went thin, like a crying of wind, and she melted into a bright white mist that spired to the roof-beams and shuddered away through the smoke-hole. Never again was she seen.
Now the knife, because you came down for it. She spared him for his youth. She married him for his. And what undid the whole arrangement was tenderness: the lamplight, the watching, the wish to hand his wife the worst night of his life because she was the person he trusted with things. She set her condition against every listener in the world, and lost to the one inside her own house. He was not weak that night. He was doing the most intimate thing a man can do — giving someone the story of himself — and the person he gave it to was the story. Twenty years of not aging beside a man who kept saying nothing: she had a longer vow than his, and she broke first, by leaving, and her last words were arithmetic. Count the children. That is what the dead leave instead of forgiveness: a ledger with your name on it. Watch the lamplight tonight. One snow pays ten.