A delicate work of autofiction – it reads most like a Chloe Aridjis or Rachel Cusk novel – about a woman and her Hong Kong-raised mother on a trip to Tokyo. You get a bit of a flavour of Japan through their tourism (a museum, a temple, handicrafts, trains, meals), but the real focus is internal as Au subtly probes the workings of memory and generational bonds.

The woman and her mother engage in surprisingly deep conversations about the soul and the meaning of life, but these are conveyed indirectly rather than through dialogue: “she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. … The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches”. Though I highlighted a fair few passages, I find that no details have stuck with me. This is just the sort of spare book I can admire but not warm to.

I found this to be an evocative and impressionistic little novella. A daughter takes her mother on a trip to Japan. She has high expectations and has made all sorts of plans but finds that her mother does not care all that much about the activities, the art, the food. Things the daughter has been taught to love and care about during her studies. Her mother however is content just to follow her normal routine. I recognised how as children we want our parents to enjoy what we enjoy, give them what we think of as special, only to find that they have their own tastes and desires.

The setting reminded me of Elise Dusapin's The Pachinko Parlour, which also features a daughter of emigrants going on a trip to Japan with family, although that had a bit more tension and plot whereas here a lot is left to the imagination. The absence of a plot is not a problem at all by the way: the calm story and the nicely integrated flashbacks are interesting enough and I was easily drawn in.

Atmospheric, contemplative novella that recalls the surreal state of mind that I get when traveling in unfamiliar places. Indeed this book reads like the Impressionist paintings and artwork that the narrator reflects on. There’s not a lot of direct plot - a woman goes on a trip to Japan with her mother - but it’s the evocation of her surroundings and her circuitous thoughts as she travels that makes this quiet book feel much deeper. The mix of hyper present observation with internal reminiscence seems like the kind of thing that can only be achieved when unmoored in another place where one feels their own foreignness. This book reminded me of traveling again and the shifting gradients within being adrift, wandering, and discovery.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC.

There was a lot packed into this short book.

First, the beautiful descriptions of place and things have to be acknowledged. I haven't been to Japan, but if it looks as described, I want to go. The little things are vivid, yet sparsely described. This is a rare talent, and I appreciate the author's ability.

Then there is the mother-daughter relationship. It is clear that they love each other, but the question is: at what point in time is this set? It could be that this may be a trip the daughter took on her own, in remembrance of her mother, as she is cleaning her (possibly deceased) mother's home at one point. Is this love real, or is it a desired relationship on the part of the daughter?

The immigrant experience is also described in spare, but haunting prose-here the mother and daughter world views are very different, yet also similar in many ways, and hints to their relationships: to themselves, each other, their family and their surroundings.

This little book is very haunting, thought-provoking, and very much re-readable. I look forward to more from Jessica Au.

Thank you to the publisher, Fitzcarraldo, and to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a quiet and haunting debut where traces of memory and the many invisible threads between people and moments are brought to the surface.

We look at the world through various snapshots of a mother and daughter, with moments and stories sitting alongside crystal-clear flashes of senses and feelings, and the result is something really quite beautiful.

For a book as short as this, it manages to build an incredibly layered and rich story, whilst still feeling like the narrator is gently walking through life and telling the story at her pace, always reaching for something just beyond her.

This book is a great reminder of what Fitzcarraldo does excellently- finding those odd stories that feel like they sit between fiction and non-fiction, and giving them the space to breathe.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

what an extraordinary novella, not only gorgeous prose on every level but also giving me the sense of feeling lighter than I felt before. And wiser. The narrator is intensely observant of both her environment and her inner worlds. She describes her family in ways that aren't always complementary but that are always full of love. Au perfectly channels the sensibility of a young person trying to understand the world in a deeper way. The novella reminds me of other recent favorites including Three O'Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio and Optic Nerve by María Gainza--if you loved those, then you will love this--but it has a, well, the best word for it really is 'love'--it has a love of life and language and for me catapulted it beyond even these great favorites.

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au is a short novel about a mother-daughter relationship, art, travel, the immigrant experience.

I read Cold Enough for Snow in a sitting; I loved how poetic it is, and Tokyo as the setting is always gorgeous. A mother and daughter visit Tokyo during a rainy season. They walk around the city, take the trains, visit museums and galleries, eat tasty meals in restaurants. And at the same time, they talk about the past, their memories, family, the things they see at the shops, art, literature and many more things. But you can sense that even though they are talking, there are many questions that aren’t asked.

Although this book was extremely short, I found the writing to be too meandering and I didn't want to pick the book up.

Cold Enough for Snow: a wonderful title, and a story which definitely warmed my heart and engaged my intellect in equal measure. This is a first person narration told entirely in reported speech. The rhythm of the prose, its precision, the equal importance it gives to descriptions, reflexions, reported dialogue, and the seamless interweaving of past and present, made it for me a riveting reading experience.
The nameless narrator, a daughter in her 30s, has arranged a trip abroad with her mother, who she sees now rarely as they live in different cities. It is not the first time the narrator has visited Japan, but it will be the first for her mother - a place of neutrality and discovery ideal, she thinks, for getting beyond what she perceives the mundanity/superficiality of their relationship... Who has not tried a trip like this? I have. This novel travelogue takes you through a carefully planned tour of Japan. Cities have been selected, museums, especial buildings, nature trails... I loved the almost namelessness of the places, the small hints (names unnecessary as what was important was described and ruminated in a very succinct yet so resonant manner). A similar approach is taken to the memories of the past which keep creeping in the narrator's conciousness and which prompt an obvious thought: which memories are being entertained by the mother? which were her expectations for the trip? The daughter's thoughts revolve about culture in its widest sense - art, language, work ethic, spirituality... and particularly difference in relation to it and its consumption and appreciation, its dislocating power, thrown into focus by the narrator's immigrant family. Of course, another central theme is the levels of knowability of the other.
I particularly liked of this novella its non-pretentious yet almost elegiac tone, and how it pondered some deep conundrums in our dealings with family and culture in a rather mesmerising manner that brought to mind some French nouveau roman novels. I am looking forward to more from Jessica Au and will be seeking her first novel, Cargo, right now.
With many thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions via NetGalley for an opportunity to read and review this wonderful, intelligent and rewarding novel.

As soon as I’d finished this beautiful book, I wanted to read it again. That’s my ultimate praise really. It’s very short and nothing much really happens, but it’s completely captivating. A woman and her mother spend a few days travelling round Japan: that’s it. It’s a Sebaldian narrative - no dialogue, discursive tangents into memory, reflection, art, personal history, narrated while in constant motion - walking city streets, sight-seeing, hiking, shopping, the narrator caught up in her own thoughts throughout, and an abrupt ending. The mother becomes more of a stranger, she and her daughter separated by language - no common ‘mother tongue’ - and inter-generational cultural shifts which the travels though Japan, the mother’s country of birth, gradually accentuate. The mother is an enigma, always in the background, her actions ambivalent, her feelings and thoughts unknown, her memories unreliable. We see her through a telescope the wrong way round, close but far away. The prose is exquisite, meditative, melancholy: seemingly rambling but on reflection densely packed. Water is the only constant - rain, mist, streams, lakes, tea, soup, just as I remember Japan too. A beautiful, puzzling, evocative read.

A daughter and her mother take a trip to Japan. The story is narrated by the daughter who thinks about their relationship, their lives, and their past. As they travel, their journey is interrupted by memories
The pair have a close yet achingly distant relationship with a dislocation between the generations and their immigrant experiences.
It’s an intense, melancholic read with vibes of Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills. The whole thing feels dream-like and elusive - you never feel like you’re on stable ground. Even the narrator feels unreliable - as do some of the memories. I wasn’t completely sure her mum was with her on the trip (her presence has a shadowy, ghostly feel) or whether the trip happened at all! Does she just wish it had? Things are not as they appear - there is a disconnection. What’s real? What’s imagined or wished for? What’s time? What’s memory? And how do they all link together?
For me, it’s a poignant story of grief and loss. It is beautifully written, simple yet rich - haunting and unsettling. I loved it!
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. All views are my own.

A mesmerizing, reflective novel about a daughter and mother's trip to Japan and the branching conversations and memories their time together inspires. This novel portrays the contemplative moments of every day life, when something we see triggers a core memory, and how we can only make sense of our impressions if they are rendered in a new light. This book explores what it means to be known and unknown and the closeness and unbridgeable space between daughters and mothers. The author gorgeously describes several uncanny human moments, bringing a universality to experiences I thought only I have had. While short on plot, I highly recommend if you are in the mood for an interior, beautifully-written piece of art.

Thanks to NetGalley and New Directions for the ARC! I plan to feature this on my TikTok: @alistofreads

I was looking forward to reading this book following the description, especially as I used to live in Japan. While the writing is thoughtful and nuanced, unfortunately for me, I didn't get a sense of story at all. It could have been so much more developed between the mother and daughter and the ending just felt abrupt. I had so many questions throughout and as a reader, I just felt frustrated.

A short and detailed book, with a lot left unsaid - much like the relationship between our narrator and her mother.

A woman and her mother go on holiday together to Japan, after not seeing much of one another in the past few years. The holiday is spent by the daughter reflecting upon their relationship with one another, as well as the daughter's relationship with her own life, past and present. The duo visit exhibitions, go shopping, travel to different cities - we get to know their relationship through these events. The mother and daughter are not the main characters of the book, but rather the mother-daughter relationship. We see the mother through the daughter's eyes, how the daughter thinks the mother is feeling or what she wants to do - as "anything will do" is the response the mother gives. There is one part where the daughter notices her mother wants to go into a shop - the mother does not say so, but the desire is felt by the daughter. The mother-daughter relationship is not the usual type we read in books or see in film - where the mother and daughter are either super close best-of-friends or don't get along. It is very much a bond of relationship in this book, they have a relationship because they are mother and daughter, not despite the fact. They spend an entire holiday together, and we don't know if they talk about any "serious" issues - it could easily be a teenage daughter on a shopping trip with her mother. I could feel the love in the pages the characters had for one another, and it spread through me.

A mother and her grown daughter meet in Japan for a holiday, spending time in Tokyo, Ibaraki and Kyoto. As they visit shrines and other attractions they talk - the daughter, as narrator, also noting what is also unsaid and not shared.

I thought it was a beautiful meandering meditation on family, changing roles within a family, the mother-daughter relationship and also a meditation on memory, identity, of ‘otherness’.

I absolutely loved this novella and will highly recommend to friends.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publishers, Fitzcarraldo Editions, for making this ARC available to me for a fair and honest review.

Cold Enough For Snow

A beautifully written, deceptively simple novel about mothers and daughters, the passage of time, and the ways in which we communicate with each other and often miss the mark. Like the title, the prose made me feel as if I were in a hushed, snowy wood and I could hear each flurry drop.

A daughter and mother meet at a train station, and even this description carries weight, “All the while, 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, but continue to drift further and further apart.” The book invites the reader in with its quiet reflections and intimate gestures.

At one point, the daughter wants to take a candid photo of her mother with her new camera, but instead her mother poses stiffly, spoiling the moment. She reflects, “I had wanted to catch something different, to see her face as it was during ordinary time.” The author seems to pause each moment of their journey and bring it to life, in time that is ordinary, yet numinous.

Read this is you appreciate well written stories on mothers and daughters, memory and history, travel, museums, good food, and the small but meaningful distances between us. If this novel were a folded piece of paper it would unfold to be an intricate snowflake to hold in your hands.

An elegant, meditative novella with an ending which sent me reeling.

On holiday together the unnamed narrator and her mother bimble around Tokyo, Ibaraki, and Kyoto, pottering through shops, museums, and galleries. The narrator reflects on art, memory, and the engineering of artlessness. She tries to photograph her mother in unguarded moments - but her mother is too quick, composing her features and hiding herself behind poise.

And here is the narrator’s great frustration: she wishes to seize and understand the essence of the world around her. To see through Monet’s brushstrokes, through Greek prose, through sculpture, through nature even, to a hidden core under all the craft - a secret pentimento - that will reveal true knowledge.

She studies hard. Asks questions. Photographs. But is this the way to enlightenment?

Cold Enough for Snow will appeal to readers of Patrick Modiano and Rachel Cusk. There is little plot, instead the narrative eddies with memory, reflection, and anecdote. But these anecdotes pull weight: in just a handful of paragraphs, Au’s secondary characters come alive, fully inhabiting their moments.

A lovely work of art.

"It was a grey, cold day and we were the only two people in the room. I asked my mother what she believed about the soul and she thought for a moment. Then, looking not at me but at the hard, white light before us, she said she believed that we were all essentially nothing., just a series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, shuddering until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere."

This observational and meditative travelogue follows a daughter and her mother during a trip to Japan. The daughter is the narrator of the story, often observing in quiet and poetic ways, more often reflecting on her past and current relationships, all while traveling and attempting to understand her mother. It is an exploration of mother-daughter relationships and how complicated they can be. A touching elegy. A reflective and subdued novel. There are a lot of very lovely descriptions of light, which reminded me of Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima. Also, I truly loved that last paragraph! Oof!! That paragraph alone can be a prose poem.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4265064433?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.

Cold Enough for Snow left me with a huge lump in my throat! It's such a gentle mediation on art, on love, on being a child of emigrants, on being open to knowledge and new experiences; a mediation on life itself, I guess. But what really touched was the exploration of parent-child relationship when the differences between the two is at times too big to bridge. That moment when a child simply cannot understand his/her parent no matter how much effort is put into it. A coldness that may not be coming from a lack of love, but rather from different life experiences, different upbringings and expectations(something I've seen happening in first generation children born to migrant parents). But also the enormity of the love flowing between mother and child. And that closing line of this novella left me reeling, because I've glimpsed myself that huge hole that sooner or later is gonna open...

This affected me in a dual way: firstly because it reflected so closely my own relationship with my mother, that sometime feels like a complete stranger to me. And at the same time I am the mother of children that are first generation, born to migrant parents. In many ways I understand both experiences, I know the joy and the sorrow!