The Day We Carried Winter Down the Mountain for a Single Spoonful

To eat something cold at the height of summer is nothing at all, these days.

A machine shaves the ice and hands you a glittering heap of it. You drop a cube from the tray into your barley tea with a clink. Nobody thinks to be grateful. If it melts away into water, well — you simply freeze it again.

But long ago, to taste ice in summer was permitted only to a mere handful of people, at the very top of this world.

Ice can only be made in winter. To keep it until summer, it seems there was nothing for it but to hide it in the dark deep in the mountains and make it endure, desperately, against melting. And of the ice that had barely survived that long, a lady would lift one small fragment on a spoon, and take it into her mouth. That, I suppose, was the very height of luxury.

What I saw was this — how far that summer ice had come, from how distant a mountain, trailing how much sweat, before it reached the lady's single spoonful.

It was the summer of the year 1000 — Chōhō 2. Around Nijō in Heian-kyō, in the days when I was doing menial work at the mansion of a certain kandachime, one of the senior nobles of the court.

That summer, I was given the task of receiving the ice, and of shaving it.

Ice comes from a himuro, an ice house, up in the mountain hollows to the north. Ice cut in the depths of winter is dropped into a deep pit, buried thick under kaya reeds and fallen leaves, then covered over with earth, and left to sleep out the summer in the dark. They dig them into the northern face of a mountain, on the slope the sun never reaches. Crawl inside, and no matter how the world above was blazing, the chill sank clean into your bones. Ice, it seems, is a thing that cannot live to see summer unless you cut it off from the light and guard it with human hands.

From the ice house to the capital is a long way. So it was always carried by night. They came down the mountain in the darkest, coolest hour before sunrise, and brought it into the capital before the sky had fully whitened. Sweating men shouldered it in turns, hurrying without rest. Even so, by the time it arrived the load had grown a good deal lighter. As it traveled, the ice turned its own body into water and let it fall, drop by drop, onto the road.

That summer the capital was unbearably hot. The glare off the earthen walls made the road shimmer and rise; the dogs sprawled under the eaves with their tongues out. Even the well water was tepid, and fanning stirred nothing but a lukewarm air. Wipe the sweat away and it welled up again. In all that heat, ice alone was a thing that came from some other world entirely. Which is why, I suppose, it was worth sitting up a whole night to carry it.

Unloading it at the gate at dawn was my work.

When I brushed the kaya aside and peeled back the damp mushiro, the straw matting, the ice that came out was less than half of what had left the mountain. The clear block had clouded white, every corner rounded away, worn down to the size of two fists. Cold enough to hurt the palm when you touched it — and yet, even as I watched, it let another drop fall from its edge, and another.

This was all that was left of what men had sweated a whole night through to carry.

I wrapped the shrunken block in cloth, held it against me, and ran to the coolest boarded room in the house — the north corner, where the wind passed beneath the floor. There I set it down and covered it with kaya again, and kept watch until the young lady should call for it, praying, near enough, that it would live an hour longer. The higher the sun climbed, the more the whole house steamed, and from inside the cloth in my arms came the small trickling sound of water falling. It was the sound of the ice growing thinner, moment by moment.

In the early afternoon, one of the ladies-in-waiting called to me. The young lady would take her ice.

I took up a new kanamari, a metal bowl, and wiped it carefully with a cloth. The vessel had to be new. In an old bowl, all that coldness would look shabby. There were mountains of such small proprieties attached to this one spoonful of cool.

I sharpened a small knife, laid the shrunken ice on my knee, and slid the blade across it, shaving — shhk, shhk — thin, and thinner still. The shavings piled up in the bowl like cotton, raising a faint mist that pushed the heat around it gently back. My fingertips went red at once, and before long the feeling drifted out of them. Still I did not stop my hands. Shave one flake too thick, and it would be that much duller as it melted on the tongue. Even as the cold numbed my fingers, sweat sprang out on my forehead. To be drenched in sweat while making something cold — it was a strange business.

Over the finished white mountain, I let fall a single thread of amazura, drawn slowly down.

Amazura is a sweetener, thick and amber-colored, taken by boiling down the sap of a vine. This was in the days before sugar had ever come into the mouths of this country. Every sweet thing was precious, and amazura above all took great labour to make; it was not something that could be used freely, it seems. That precious thread soaked down into the white mountain of ice. Within the coldness, a faint sweetness was lit — one spoonful's worth.

That, I carried, raised in both hands.

In the dimness beyond the misu, the hanging blind of split bamboo, the young lady took up a silver spoon. She lifted one spoonful of the ice and brought it to her mouth. After a hush, a small breath escaped her. It never became a voice, and yet it could not be hidden: a sigh straight from the heart. Her body, listless with the heat, came loose for the briefest moment, like a child's — I could see that much even through the blind.

To eat something cold in summer. That alone was a dream of a luxury, allowed to only a few in all this world. A mountain's worth of darkness, and a night's worth of men's sweat, shrunk down at last to a single spoonful beyond the blind, and vanishing there. Whether it was worth the cost or not — no one asked that any longer.

While the young lady ate, I waited in the corner of the gallery. Just beside me, a little girl named Ako sat primly. A child with thin arms and legs, kept for the water work. Ako had been staring at the bowl in my arms for some time now.

The truth is that Ako had come the day before, and the day before that, to stand near me while I shaved the ice, peering in fearfully. Her eyes wanted to ask what it was, but she never once said it aloud. She understood, child as she was, that it was not a thing one asked about. Never in her life had Ako put ice in her mouth. Of course she hadn't. Ice was not for the likes of us. The white treasure carried out of the mountain dark existed only for the person beyond the blind. That it was so, everyone took for granted.

The young lady withdrew, and the bowl came back into my hands. At the bottom, a pinch of ice I had failed to shave was still lying there, smeared with amazura. A small thing that would soon be water and gone.

I beckoned Ako over.

I tilted the bowl and spilled the half-melted ice into her small palm. Ako's eyes went round as she looked at it. Then, timidly, she touched it with the tip of her tongue.

Her shoulders jumped.

The cold had startled her. She had never imagined that anything so cold existed in this world. Ako gave a small gasp — and yet she would not pull her hand away. Once more, and this time she set it properly on her tongue. After the cold came the faint sweetness of the amazura, following behind it. Ako's face crumpled. I thought she would cry. She did not. With a look I cannot put into words — as though she were about to weep, and yet were happier than she could bear — Ako laughed.

"It's cold... it's so cold."

It was all she could say, and she said it over and over. The ice in her palm had already turned mostly to water, running away between her fingers. Ako licked up even the last drop of it, grudging every bit. And still, unwilling to part with it, she went on gazing at her wet palm — as though making sure that the thing which had just vanished had truly been in this world at all.

"Say — where does it come from?" Ako asked in a small voice. Deep in the mountains there is a cold place where it doesn't melt even in summer, I told her, and they carry it here through a whole night. Ako's mouth fell half open, and her eyes took on the look of one picturing a far mountain she had never seen. That cold things should lie sleeping in the dark of a mountain must have sounded, to that child, like something out of a dream.

She ate something cold in summer. It was, most likely, the one and only summer ice of her whole life. Even so, that face of hers was not a thing that faded easily.

Summer ice belonged, for a very long time, to the people above the clouds.

To dig a pit in a mountain and guard the winter's ice; to carry it through the night to the capital. All that labour, all those hands — for one spoonful for a young lady. If you want to call it a poor bargain, there has never been a poorer one. And yet, the way a single cold spoonful sinks into a body melted by the heat — that one pleasure, it seems, has not changed in the least, not in a thousand years.

As time went on, the ice came down, little by little, from the high places to the low. The ice of the ice houses was sold in the towns; before long anyone at all could taste ice in summer; and now, at the stalls along a festival street, people cram their mouths with heaps of it shaved as high as they like, red and yellow both. The single fragment that Ako touched so fearfully with the tip of her tongue will today fill a whole bowl, for the price of a child's pocket money. A fine age this has become.

Even so, I find myself thinking.

When you eat shaved ice this summer, take one spoonful — just one — and set it on your tongue more slowly than usual. Deep inside that coldness there still remain, quite certainly: the darkness in the heart of a mountain, the men who ran the whole night through in their sweat, and the voice of a small child who tasted ice for the first time and laughed with a face on the verge of tears.

Cold things vanish at once in the mouth. That is why they are all the harder to forget. It is because it vanishes, I suppose, that a single spoonful of summer lingers so long at the root of the tongue. That is the sort of thing I love.

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