A trip to Japan stirs up uncomfortable memories in this novel brimming with beautiful imagery

Cold Enough for Snow is constructed as a mystery, but the puzzle is its two central characters: a mother and a daughter, who arrive separately from an unnamed country to spend a short autumn holiday together in Tokyo. The novel is Melbourne-based Jessica Au’s UK debut, elliptical and ghostly, gleaming with beautiful imagery as bright as a shoal of tiny tetra fish. It is typhoon season, and the pair’s every action – sharing meals, walking, visiting art galleries, talking obliquely about the past and the present but never the future – appears veiled, as if through a delicate, persistent mist.

Despite Au’s clear, direct prose, these individuals communicate as if under water, and water is an ever-mutable symbol for a relationship which, from the outset, appears equivocal and cryptic: “My mother stayed close to me as if she felt that the flow of the crowd was a current, and that if we were separated, we would not be able to make our way back to each other”. The sense of ambivalence is as strong as Meursault’s opening lines in Camus’s The Outsider: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” The daughter, who is considering whether or not to have a child with her partner, Laurie, acts as narrator: her mother’s conversational input is minimal. The mother is depicted as hesitant, nervous, tired, ageing: a traveller overwhelmed by the strangeness of her new surroundings, although, as the daughter takes pains to note, always crisply attired: “She looked like a well-dressed woman in a movie from maybe twenty or thirty years ago, dated but elegant.” This could be a description of the book itself, which retains a formal, slightly old-fashioned quality.