You Can’t See the Snow Review

We’re coming up to winter and the time of year when you may suddenly start to see snow. But what if your body caused you to hibernate through the season? Leaving everyone and everything behind for several of the coldest and most isolating months of the year? Well, that is the question posed to us by Rokudo Ningen with their You Can’t See the Snow novel.

Our story follows university student Natsuki Uzume, who falls in love with Yuki Iwato one summer night after running into her at a gathering. Yuki is an art student at the same university, but as art is in an entirely different building from Natsuki (who studies literature), ordinarily, he would have never run into her. To him, this feels like fate, especially as the two grow closer over the course of the summer.

However, when autumn comes around, Yuki begins to grow distant from Natsuki. She even tells him to find a cute girlfriend and then promptly disappears from his life. As in love as Natsuki is, he doesn’t want to accept this and is determined to see her again to talk things through. But given she’s even stopped attending her classes, this is much more difficult than it first seems. No one in the department seems to know where she is, but there are rumours that Yuki never goes to school in the winter and simply vanishes.

Eventually, Natsuki finds out where she lives and visits her family home uninvited. There, he meets Yuki’s little sister Fuyumi, who treats him like a nuisance but lets him in since Yuki told her to do so if he turned up. Here, he learns a shocking truth: that Yuki has a health condition that means her body almost entirely shuts down, and she spends every winter asleep. Naturally, this has led to Yuki being hurt before when friends or partners start to feel frustrated or overwhelmed when they have to spend an entire season by themselves.

Natsuki initially feels hurt that Yuki never told him, and now he has to wait months before he can even talk to her about it. Will he be able to accept her condition, or will it prove too much for their relationship? And even if he does accept her, is he doing it with her best interests at heart? Fuyumi doesn’t even believe he can stay in love with her with zero contact for so long…

I was left with mixed feelings by the end of You Can’t See the Snow. It has an interesting concept, but because it’s not a disease that exists in reality, it feels like the author has to hand-wave a lot of things while at the same time trying to earnestly portray the realities of living with something like this. In the afterword, Ningen talks about having spent a lot of time in the hospital (where they spent time writing this book), and their author profile talks about them being diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. This experience is surely what led them to depict such a grounded portrayal of not only what it means to live with an illness like this, but also how it impacts everyone and everything around you.

This is particularly apparent with Fuyumi, who feels very protective of Yuki but also feels unseen by her parents, who are always so desperate to take care of and support Yuki. Secretly, she grows fond of Natsuki despite her harsh attitude toward him, and is increasingly worried that her older sister is going to completely break his heart. We don’t necessarily see a lot of her parents, but what we do see is also quite realistic for a situation like this.

I think this is ultimately where I struggle with this book. I like how it depicts Yuki’s situation, but less so the romance. Especially at the start, when Natsuki is so desperate to find her after she vanishes, when they hadn’t been going out very long. He even breaks into the university facility room to get her address. I know love can make people do stupid things, but Natsuki ranges from being relatively grounded to obsessive. He also does some really thoughtless things toward the end, which fit what we’ve seen of his character, but still left me feeling irritated with him. Having said that, I still liked enough elements of this book that I’d recommend it to others if you enjoy this sort of ‘impossible romance’ premise. It’s not perfect, but the things Ningen gets right are well worth experiencing.

You Can’t See the Snow comes to the West thanks to Yen Press under the Yen On imprint and has been translated by Taylor Engel. The translation reads well with no issues to note. There are no extras to speak of here, but like Yen Press published novels, this has been released in an attractive hardback format.

This is Ningen’s third novel since their debut and the first to make it to the West. It was the winner of the 28th Dengeki Novel Prize, so you can see why an English publisher would choose to start here. I’m hoping that in time we’ll see more of their books make it into translation, as it seems Ningen has some very interesting concepts and based on this one, I’m curious to see more.

Overall, You Can’t See the Snow is a sci-fi twist on forbidden (or perhaps impossible) with an impressive depiction of what it means to be in that position. The lead character is somewhat frustrating to watch over, but there’s enough here to counteract that, where I think readers interested in this genre will still enjoy it.

Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.