Rereading Buying Mittens: A Question Left in the Snowy Night

Hello, this is Kazu.

I have rewritten Niimi Nankichi’s Buying Mittens in easy Japanese.

As I read the original story again and again, scenes I had simply passed over as a child began to reveal new layers of meaning.

The light of the snow.
The small hand reaching out through the crack of the door.
The mother’s voice heard from beneath the window.
And the small murmur left by the mother fox at the very end of the story.

Buying Mittens is a gentle story.
But it is not only gentle.

In this story, the mother fox’s memory of being chased by humans and the young fox’s discovery when he returns saying, “Humans aren’t scary at all,” both remain, without either one being erased.

I want to write about three scenes that have stayed with me.

This is not an essay meant to give the right answer.
It is simply what this story left with me, as one reader.
I hope you will read it alongside your own response to the story.

The Little Fox Holds Out His Left Hand

“Hold out your human hand.”

The mother fox tells her child this again and again.

By his mother’s power, only the little fox’s right hand has been changed into the hand of a human child.
When he reaches the town, he is supposed to hold out that hand and buy his mittens.
He must not show his real hand — the fox’s hand.

The little fox answers as he has been told.
I won’t make a mistake, he says.

And yet, when the hat shop door opens, the little fox holds out his left hand.

It is not the human hand.
It is the fox’s hand.
The hand his mother told him never to show.

Through the narrow opening of the door, the hat seller looks at the hand.
He sees that it is a fox’s hand.

And then the hat seller says:

“The money first, please.”

One: The Hat Seller

What does the hat seller not say?

He does not say, “Get out, you fox.”
He does not say, “Poor thing, I’ll give them to you for free.”

The hat seller says only one thing.

“The money first, please.”

The little fox hands over the two coins his mother gave him.

The hat seller places the coins on his fingertips and taps them together.
Clink, clink. The sound rings clear.

They are not leaves.
They are real money.

In Japanese folklore, foxes are said to be able to bewitch people and make leaves look like money.
The hat seller must know this.
That is why, the moment he sees the little fox’s hand, he suspects he is being tricked.

But once he knows the money is real, the hat seller takes a pair of children’s woolen mittens from the shelf and hands them to the little fox.

Here, the hat seller does not treat the little fox as someone special.

He does not give the mittens away out of kindness.
He does not take pity on the little fox and help him.

A paying customer receives the goods.
The hat seller does not change that ordinary rule — not even for a fox.

This is not a scene in which someone is saved by human kindness.
Nor is it a scene in which someone is turned away for being a fox.

The hat seller does not see the little fox as “a poor little fox.”
Nor does he see him as “a fox to be driven off.”

He treats him as a customer who has brought money.

It is not kindness.
It is not cruelty.

He does not open his heart to the little fox.
He does not close the door on him either.

I am drawn to this distance the hat seller keeps.

The hat seller does not ask about the little fox’s circumstances.
He does not ask where he came from, or how cold he is.
He checks the money. He hands over the mittens.

That distance may look a little cold.
And yet, within that distance, there is room for the little fox.

He is not driven away for being a fox.
If the money is real, the mittens are his.

What the hat seller does may not be a special act of kindness.
Even so, that ordinary exchange is what protects the little fox’s hands.

Through that narrow crack in the door, the little fox touches the human world.

What a Mistake Opens

The little fox makes a mistake.

Though his mother has told him again and again, the dazzling light startles him when the door opens.
He holds out his left hand.

What would have happened if the little fox had held out his right hand, as he was supposed to?

The hat seller might have noticed nothing.
The little fox might have bought his mittens as a human customer and gone back to the forest as if nothing had happened.

And his mother’s warning would have remained untouched.

Humans are frightening.
If they know you are a fox, terrible things will happen.
So you must never show your true self.

Had the little fox behaved correctly, that warning would not have been shaken.

But the little fox makes a mistake.
He holds out his real hand.

And it is that mistake that lets him see a human being.

In many stories, a child’s mistake leads to punishment.
The child fails, suffers, repents, and grows.
That pattern is very easy to understand.

But Buying Mittens does not follow that pattern.

This story does not scold the little fox.
It does not make him cry.
It does not make him speak words of regret.

With his wrong hand still held out, the little fox finds himself facing a human being a little different from the one he had imagined.

His mistake remains a mistake.
Holding out his left hand was not the right thing to do.

And yet, because of that left hand, the little fox sees what he could never otherwise have seen.

There is the crack in the door.
There is the dazzling light.
There is the hat seller, looking at a fox’s hand.
There are the two coins, ringing.

There is a human being there, a little different from the one in his mother’s warning.

There is a quietness here that I love.

A mistake does not always bring only punishment.
Sometimes, it can shift, just a little, the way one sees humans.

Buying Mittens does not explain this with grand words.

A small left hand is held out through the crack of a door.

That is all.

Two: The Voice from the Window

After buying the mittens, the little fox does not go straight back to the forest.

He wants to see, even a little, what humans are like.

As he passes beneath the window of a house, he hears a voice.
A gentle voice. A beautiful voice. A slow, unhurried voice.

A human mother’s voice.

“Sleep, sleep,
against your mother’s breast.
Sleep, sleep,
in your mother’s arms.”

The little fox stops.

He stands still on the snowy road, listening to the song.

Hearing that voice, the little fox thinks it must be a human mother’s voice.
Because when he himself falls asleep, his own mother wraps him in just such a gentle voice.

Then a child’s voice comes from inside.

“Mama, on a cold night like this, don’t you think the little fox in the forest is crying, ‘Cold, cold’?”

The human child is thinking about a little fox in the forest he has never seen.

Perhaps he is crying, Cold, cold.
That is what the child imagines.

And beneath that very same window, the real little fox of the forest is standing.

The child inside the window does not see the little fox.
The little fox does not see the child’s face either.

And still, the child thinks of the fox in the forest, and the fox in the forest listens to the child’s voice.

The human mother answers:

“The little fox in the forest is probably listening to his mother fox’s song and trying to sleep in his burrow. Now, my dear, you should go to sleep too. Who do you think will fall asleep first — you, or the little fox in the forest? I am sure it will be you.”

The human mother places her own child, and a little fox of the forest she has never seen, into the same night.

Into the same cold.
Close to the same sleep.

No one in the house discovers the little fox.
No one speaks to him.
No one helps him.

And still, the words reach him.

Inside a human house, someone is thinking about a small fox like him.
Without seeing him, without knowing him, someone is wondering whether he is cold.

This is entirely different from the scene at the hat shop.

The hat seller deals with the little fox through a rule.
If the money is real, the mittens are his.
It is a way of receiving with distance.

The mother and child behind the window are not entering into any exchange with the little fox.
They do not even know he is there.

I find myself pausing each time I come to this scene.

To imagine the cold of someone you cannot see.
To worry over the sleep of someone you have never met.

It is not done because anyone has asked for it.
It simply spills out of the words of the mother and child behind the window.

And that thought reaches the little fox standing on the snowy road.

The mother and child behind the window do not see the little fox.
The little fox does not see their faces either.

And yet, on that one night, they are held in the same cold.
Close to the same sleep.

Three: The Mother Fox’s Murmur

At the edge of the forest, the mother fox has been waiting all this time.

When the little fox returns, the mother fox holds him tight against her chest.
She is so happy she could almost cry.

If the story had ended here, it would still be a complete story.

The little fox has come home safely.
He has bought the mittens.
His hands, once so cold, are now protected.

But Buying Mittens does not end there.

The two foxes set off, back toward the forest.
The moon is out.
On the snow, the tracks of the two foxes go on.

The little fox is wearing the mittens he has bought.

The little fox says to his mother:

“Mama, humans aren’t scary at all.”

He tells her how he made the mistake of holding out his real hand.
And how, even so, the hat seller sold him the mittens.
That is all he tells her.

The little fox does not speak of the voices beneath the window.

That the human child was thinking of a forest fox.
That the human mother had placed her own child and a forest fox close to the same sleep.

Those things, he does not tell his mother.

What the little fox tells his mother is only about the hat seller.

Startled, the mother fox cries out, “Oh my!”
And then, for a while, she cannot speak.

At last, looking at the distant lights of the town, the mother fox quietly murmurs:

“I wonder if humans really are good.
I wonder if humans really are good.”

The mother fox repeats the same words twice.

It is that twice that remains at the end of the story.

If she said it only once, it might sound like a passing thought.
I wonder if humans are good.
And then the thought might pass.

But the mother fox says it twice.

She says it once, and no answer comes.
She says it again, and still no answer comes.

She cannot say, “Humans are good.”
But neither can she say, “Humans are not good.”

So it remains as a question: I wonder if humans really are good.
And with that question still open, the story closes.

The little fox comes home with certainty.

Humans aren’t scary, he thinks.

That certainty is no small thing.

The hat seller did not catch him.
The hat seller sold him the mittens.
Beneath the window, the little fox heard the gentle voices of a human mother and child.

The little fox has seen, with his own eyes, that humans are not only frightening.

But the mother fox’s hesitation, too, has weight.

The mother fox carries a memory from long ago, when humans chased her.

There were loud voices.
There were footsteps drawing nearer.
There was a night when she ran, almost caught, barely escaping.

That fear is not erased by the brightness her child has brought home from a single night.

“Humans are frightening” was true.
“Humans are not frightening” was also true.

To choose only one would be to erase the other truth.

And so the mother fox cannot answer.

I am drawn to this ending.

The mother fox does not deny her child’s words.
She does not throw away her own past.

She carries both within herself and walks on beneath the moon.

On the snow, the tracks of two foxes go on.

One has just come back from the lights of the town.
The other still watches those lights from afar.

Holding All Three

At the hat shop, we meet a human who follows a rule.
If the money is real, he hands over the mittens — even to a fox.

Behind the window, we meet humans who can imagine someone they have never met.
They place a forest fox they have never seen close to their own child’s sleep.

And in the mother fox’s murmur, humans cannot be reduced to a single answer.

Frightening, and not frightening.
Cold, and warm.
Far, and near.

These three do not settle into one answer.

And because they do not, Buying Mittens remains with me after the story ends.

When we read a children’s tale, we tend to look for a moral.

What is this story teaching us?
What is the right answer?
Where is the answer hidden?

But this story does not hand us an answer, even at the very end.

The little fox has lived through a night in which the lights of the town came a little closer.
The mother fox has lived through a night in which she still gazed at those lights from afar.

The story does not say which one is right.

There is a little fox whose view of the town changes in a single night.
There is a mother fox who, because she has lived longer, cannot so easily bring herself to believe.

And those two are walking side by side across the snow.

When I shop in town, I sometimes find myself remembering the crack in the hat seller’s door.
When I think of someone I cannot see, I find myself remembering the little fox standing beneath the window.
When I cannot bring myself to call something “good” outright, the mother fox’s small voice returns to me.

“I wonder if humans really are good.”

Can a single heart hold both a night of fear and the warmth found afterward?

Buying Mittens does not hurry to answer.

The little fox’s hands are no longer cold.

But the mother fox’s question still lingers in the snowy night.

Kazu