Yuki chan in Bronte Country by Mick Jackson

Author:Mick Jackson [Mick Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571303595
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yukiko sometimes has trouble remembering how she felt about snow before the death of her mother. She assumes that, like most other children, she admired its powers of disruption and transformation and considered it great material with which to play. Even now, despite what it did to her mother and, indeed, how it fucked up her entire family, she doesn’t resent or particularly fear it. She’s simply a little more inclined to take it seriously.

It must be five or six years since she first heard of Ukichiro Nakaya and his snow experiments, although she didn’t get her hands on Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial till she was at college and managed to track down a copy in the library. Nakaya is sometimes credited with compiling the first general classification of snow crystals, and indeed one page of the book has each fundamental type laid out in a grid, like a sort of periodic table of snow. But Yuki knows, even from her own amateur investigations, that Suzuki Bokushi created a similar chart a hundred years earlier, in Snow Country Tales. No, the reason Yuki is so in awe of Ukichiro Nakaya is that he approached snow with the same intelligence and rigour you’d expect of any scientist, and along the way worked out what conditions influence each crystal’s design.

She’s no idea how many years he devoted to snow analysis before attempting to create his own artificial crystal. There are photographs of him out in the snow up Mount Tokachi, bent over a microscope, and to this day Yuki can’t conceive how you take a crystal, fix it to a slide and tuck it under the eyepiece while keeping it intact. He had assistants, Yukiko knows this. Quite possibly a whole team of snow-folk eager to serve him in any useful way. But when she pictures him going about his icy business she prefers to think of him out there on his own – monastic, as befits a man contemplating something as delicate, as ethereal as snow.

The first time she opened up Snow Crystals in one of the study cubicles at the university she all but squawked, like a goddamned bird or something. The book contains some text and a fair number of graphs and tables, but most of it just consists of hundreds of microscopic photographs of snow crystals, half a dozen to a page. In hindsight, she should maybe have limited herself to a couple of pages on that first encounter. Allowed herself to be blown away by the weird mechanical beauty and the astounding symmetry, before returning the book to the shelves – and come back, refreshed and psychically rested, the following day. But she turned the page to find another dozen, even more ornate and viciously barbed creations, all sprouting from the same hexagonal core. So that by the time she turned the page a second, third and fourth time she was inundated, and what had seemed incredible a minute earlier became so strange as to be practically meaningless.

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