The ryokan keeps a ledger of the day's temperatures, as if weather were a mild form of literature. At four in the afternoon the bathhouse is empty and the snow is coming down in the unhurried way of snow that has all night. The onsen is a rotating cast of neighbors: the woman who swims laps, the old man who sits exactly at the overflow, the traveler who has come, like me, to thaw. Nobody speaks. Speaking would be a kind of violence. I understand now why the Japanese call this a medicine. Not for the minerals in the water, but for the minutes in it — unmarked, unclaimed, yours.