Cold Enough for Snow is told from the point of view of an unnamed woman who meets with her mother for a trip to Japan. As they explore Tokyo and Kyoto and visit art galleries and restaurants, the narrator’s descriptions of their conversations begin to merge with her memories of childhood, the memories of her mother, and even those of her sister. Her narration of the present winds so tightly with her own memories, and those of others, the reader is left to wonder who is actually speaking; how much of our own identity is actually ours, and how much we might inherit our sense of self from others.

Long passages unfold in which the narrator finds memories coiled within present-day experiences, and what might start as a conversation about the food in a restaurant winds back to someone else’s recollections of an event that happened 50 years previously in another country. Though short, Cold Enough For Snow is rich with description; the sensual invocations of Impressionist paintings or traditional fabrics or the way the evening rain falls on the Japanese landscape spark long passages of unearthed memories run through with bright seams of emotion.

A fascinating, touching story that becomes a meditation on the link between sensory experience and the intangibility of memory, ultimately asking how our lives can both recapitulate and diverge from those of the people around us.