Taro and the Snow Road

About this story

Taro, the lamplighter's son, walks the buried village road at dusk planting tall bamboo markers so no one loses the way under the coming snow. Scout walks a half-step ahead, pressing the first prints into every drift. Pole by pole the road home is drawn, and when the last marker stands, boy and dog follow their own trail back to lit windows and sleep.

The quiet pride of making the way safe for others.

You find your way home by the kindness you planted going out.

Read the beginning

The first great snow of winter was swallowing the road whole. Fields, ditches, and low stone walls all vanished together into one smooth white sea, and Taro, the lamplighter's son, stood at the gate with his big rice-coloured dog Kuma and watched the last of the path disappear. Tonight, he knew, old Mrs. Onishi must walk home across that white nothing in the dark. "If the road isn't marked, Kuma," Taro said, and his breath came out in a frightened cloud, "she'll lose her way ten steps from her own gate."

High above the vanishing village, a glossy black raven crossed the greying sky and turned one slow circle, the way you check on the things you love, then glided out over the drowning road.

Every winter, Taro's father marked that road with tall bamboo poles, one dark pole after another, all the way to the boundary stone, so that no walker was ever swallowed by the white. Taro had carried the poles behind him a hundred times, learning the way by heart.

But this evening a roof beam had cracked in the next valley, and strong hands were needed before dark. Taro's father took up his tools, paused at the door beside the waiting bundle of poles, taller than Taro himself, and said, "The snow will be heavy tonight, and I will not be home before it." Then he was gone down the lane, and the first thick flakes began to fall.

Taro looked at the poles, and out at the drowning road, and his stomach went tight with fear. He was one small boy, and the road was so very long. But he thought of Mrs. Onishi walking home into all that white nothing, and his heart made up its mind.

He heaved the heavy bundle onto his shoulder, and it near toppled him into the snow, and Kuma leaned in warm and solid against his legs to steady him. And out into the falling dark they went together, to the place where the very first pole must stand.

Taro planted the first pole deep and straight and true, just the way his father did, then waded on through the deepening snow to plant the next, and the next, his small arms burning, the cold biting his cheeks, one dark marker at a time across the white.

But halfway to the boundary stone, the snow had climbed past his knees, and his poles were nearly gone, and he could no longer tell field from ditch from road. Taro turned a slow circle in the endless white and saw no gate, no house, no path, no way at all. He had lost the road himself.

His eyes stung and filled. "I can't even find it," he whispered into the storm. "How can a boy who is lost show anyone the way?"

Then Kuma put his clever nose down deep into the snow, the nose that could find a dropped rice ball under a whole winter of white, and he snuffled, and stiffened, and set off sure and steady along a line that Taro could not see at all: the buried road, still there beneath the snow, exactly where it had always been.

And the raven dropped low out of the storm and landed just ahead, on the very spot where the next pole should stand, then lifted and landed again a little further on, marking the way through the dark one place at a time.

The story goes on in the video.