Tendō, Yamagata → Tomiyama, Yamagata

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📍 Higashine, Yamagata

📍 Murayama, Yamagata

Snow Country may be a mesmerizing novel, but a perennial weather report for Tōhoku it isn’t, and my memories of Shimamura and Komako shivering in their unheated rooms withered in the heat, which filled the Yamagata Basin like molten iron. It was a terrifying, Mesopotamian heat, and I skipped from convenience store to convenience store like a bug under a magnifying glass until the city thinned out and I walked into a ramen restaurant, dizzy and half-blind, where I was served that rarest of dishes in Japan, noodles in a broth of ice cubes. I sat and breathed, a racing car on a cool-down lap, and I walked back into the furnace of the afternoon.