This is a marvellous short novel, as controlled as its narrator, composed through careful use of language and precise observations; similes proliferate, sometimes multiple times in a sentence, while metaphors are all but non-existent; details are described in a way that's straightforward and cumulative.
In its combination of an intensely observant interiority with a psychology that is largely cloaked - including, perhaps, from itself - it reminds me of Rachel Cusk's Outline books (which I continue to love like few others, if love is the right word), but it has its own compelling specificity, some of which is particularly recognisable to me in terms of Asian-Australian experience.
There's a sense of depths cautiously stepped around, in the narrator's interactions with her mother during their Japan trip, and in the way she navigates her own memories and past experiences. Like in many novels I admire, meaning is right there on the surface - in Cold Enough for Snow, especially in the recollections, stories and dreams that take up roughly equal space as the contemporaneous trip - and at the same time elusive and never over-determined.
