A deep light snow covers everything. Blindingly white in the bright sun. Glittering. I stop to rest—even in snowshoes the going is slow, ponderous, breath-stealing. My exhales puff out in white clouds. Jazmin, Dezray, and Beowulf are loving it, all three wrassling and burying their noses in the white powder, circling in and out of the icy stream we’re walking alongside. Malamute–German Shepherd mixes, they are bred for this weather, with thickly furred pointy ears and broad paws and shaggy double coats. They have a whole repertoire of vocalizations, and howl and talk as well as bark. We have extended conversations. We do our two-hour trek through the nature preserves, on the mountainside where our cabin sits, daily—rain or shine, sleet or snow. Only in the furnace heat of a too-hot summer day do we omit it, and then I take them to swim at the lake instead.

Now their noses lift skyward, nostrils twitching, and they face to my left, ears pricked. My gaze is drawn by theirs; afar, I see the slight figure of a woman, her long, tangled, black and gray hair flowing all the way down to her feet. The dogs alert me in short staccato barks. We hear her laughter, lilting across the frozen terrain, and she disappears, fading out like a film image. I’m not perturbed by her appearance or her laughter; I know who she is. She visits us often in these mountains, this Japanese mountain witch, this yamamba. She’s been with me since my infancy.

Inside our cozy cabin, the fire in the fireplace rages, orange-yellow flames embracing the thick logs. I laze, curled up in my armchair, reading, sipping a warm cup of soothing peppermint tea. The dogs are lolling outside, buried in the snow, as snug as I am. My three cats are stretched out by the fire: the large, green-eyed, long-haired Maine Coon mix, Iwao; the dainty, sand-colored, blue-eyed Siamese mix, Sophia; and the white girl with large black spots, Cow-Kitty.

The cabin is only four rooms: a bedroom; a living room that doubles as my dining room, with a table on one side and a couch and armchair on the other; a small but well stocked and organized kitchen; and a very small guest room, or whatever extra room it needs to be, with a daybed, a night table, and its own wood stove. In the living room, a huge calligraphic painting of the Chinese/Japanese ideographic character meaning “Nothingness” (a Zen tenet) dominates one wall. On another wall is a much smaller wood-block rendering of the mythical yamamba, imported from a Japanese antique store years ago. The walls are painted a light gray with blue tints. The window trim is a pale-stained oak. The furniture is solid wood, and many pieces are antiques: my roll-top oak desk and matching chair, the teak kitchen table and chairs, the pine nightstands by my bed, still faintly fragrant.

I eat mostly vegetables and fish, procured from my friend Jenny down the mountain, who is an avid fisherwoman, but also chicken from the live poultry farm in the Berkshire foothills, and venison, another specialty procured from another foothill neighbor, who both hunts and has a venison farm. The dogs and cats also eat the fish, chicken, and venison, but they eat it mostly raw, while I eat it mostly cooked. In the spring and summer, I indulge in vegetables and lettuces and roots that I grow in my small plot, supplementing from the many farmers’ markets that line the main street in the village in the valley below. I make my own full-milk yogurt in small glass containers that I keep in my kitchen cabinet. The dogs and cats like my yogurt too. There is a small goat farm offering locally sourced cheeses and milk that we all share. I brew a sweet plum wine for late winter nights. That’s for me alone.

I am, as you might have surmised, retired.

I rarely have visitors—occasionally my sister, Emily, whose daughter is now grown up. Emily’s second husband, Tony, prefers not to accompany her on the erratic visits she makes to my little cabin. He finds me odd, as I surmise Emily does as well. Rachel, Emily’s daughter, now twenty-five years old, visits more often than anyone else. We have a special connection, going back to when she got (temporarily) lost in the mountains when she was just four years old. We’ve always seemed to understand each other, on some deep level of consciousness. We never have uncomfortable silences, just quiet time together.

On the off chance that someone visiting gets snowed or iced in, or just wants to stay the night, I can accommodate them on my little extra room’s daybed, which has an additional twin mattress that trundles out from under the top one, separated by slats. I like to live simply, unlike my sister, who positively luxuriates in wealth and luxury, as do our parents, still.

The mountains, which in clear weather pile atop one another through the wide living-room windows, are invisible now in the mist of snow and low silvery clouds. We might be in a cabin below deck on an ocean liner, drifting through the sea.

This story begins much earlier, when I was a young woman, living in New York City.

I am clairvoyant. Of course, my name is Claire. Mother was prescient, I guess. It means I see things. It also means that sometimes I know certain things will happen. A gift? A curse? You tell me. The biggest problem is that I don’t always know when what I see is a vision or just a thought. Except for the yamamba. She’s been appearing to me since before I could talk. I don’t know why, exactly. I didn’t know who she was until we moved to Japan, when I was just short of five years old; then I was finally able to identify her as a yamamba. And I don’t know what the devil she’s doing in the United States, such a long way from her homeland. Aside from her, I can’t always tell the difference between my imagination and a premonition or a vision. Which leaves me in a conundrum.

One time—it wasn’t long after I had returned to New York City for college—I was standing on a subway platform. It was a dreary, rainy weekday in the fall. I felt as if I were falling into a trance or a dream. I saw this man—he was a bum, dressed like a bum, his hair in a rat’s nest, and he stank too. Anyway, I saw him shove an old lady onto the tracks. Before he did it, of course. There were just the three of us right there. So I shoved him first, as the subway approached, before he could shove her. Then I walked away. No one saw me do it except the old lady, and she didn’t say anything.

Then, suddenly, I woke up—the state of trance lifted as suddenly as it had descended. Facing the train, I suddenly realized that my eyes were closed. I opened them. The station was lively with other people. No bum lay across the tracks in the train’s pathway. No trains were in the station at all. On the center bench, two women were gossiping and an older man read the paper. The old lady was seated in a far-off corner of the platform. Shafts of sunlight, filled with dust particles, danced down from the grates above. On the opposite platform laughed the yamamba as she faded from sight.

To this day I don’t understand what happened. I can only surmise that there had to be some reason for it, undiscernible to me. Had I really shoved him? Or was it all a hallucination? Regardless, I’ve never interfered like that again, ever, since that day. I just watch things happen twice. In the beginning, when I was a kid, it wasn’t so strange. I figured other people also saw things twice. Now that I’m older, it’s always jarring. Because, at other times, I’m just like you. Normal. I can go for months without a vision—just live my life, go to school, yoga class. The usual.

Teresa and Thomas Carrington were born to and from wealth, and Mr. Carrington continued the family tradition of dedicating himself to making money. Mrs. Carrington, like her mother, had never worked for money a day in her life. Both had been born and raised in Lenox, Massachusetts, on large tracts of land graced by fine old manors. But when Mr. Carrington started his computer-coding business—using start-up funds gifted to him by his father—the Carringtons found it more convenient to live in New York City for a spell, on the Upper East Side in a sprawling two-bedroom apartment. Accordingly, their two daughters were born in the city, Emily first, in 1962, followed by Claire in 1965.

Emily was thin and nervous as a child. Prone to anxious spells. She cried as an infant when her mother took her to Central Park and the wind howled in the trees. She watched others carefully, apparently taking in how they did things. She would say, “Mommy, how come you write with your right hand when Chelsea’s mom writes with her left?” What child of five notices such things? She loved frilly dresses and pretty shoes; dressing up was one of her favorite pastimes. She adored having her hair brushed and braided. When Claire was born, Emily showed few signs of jealousy, instead mothering Claire right beside her own mother, solicitous and empathetic when Claire cried.

While Emily was yielding by nature, Claire was stubborn and stalwart. She wanted what she wanted and did not appear easily swayed or influenced by others. Emily was chatty; Claire was not much of a talker. Emily was neat; Claire was messy. Yet the girls were close and got along well, whether at the playground or at home playing with dolls.

New York City in the 1960s was also a study in contrasts. The wealthy from the Upper East Side rubbed elbows on the subway with hippies from Greenwich Village and poor people from Harlem, the Lower East Side, Spanish Harlem. It was the era of the civil-rights movement in the United States, and race relations in the city, as elsewhere, were fraught with tensions over the changing laws, values, attitudes. The girls’ activities were centered on the Upper East Side, however, and that resulted in their being quite well shielded from those tensions. The family didn’t have a car, which was not uncommon in those days. Mr. Carrington was picked up by a driver every workday to be chauffeured to and from his midtown office.

Mr. Carrington forged a partnership with a Japanese computer firm, Deita Kanri, and their labor force was concentrated in Tokyo—things were so much cheaper in Japan in the ’60s. So the Carringtons packed up and went for an extended stay in Tokyo, four years after Claire was born. They were excited to see the exotica that they imagined in a genteel Japan, reinvented in the postwar period, and they thought that early exposure to another language and culture could only benefit their children in the long scheme of time. Once there, they sent Claire to a Japanese school, since she was just of an age for kindergarten. Since Emily had already completed first grade, they opted to send her to the American School, to continue her education in English.

The family returned to New York City in 1976. Mr. Carrington found a large rental apartment on Madison Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—the entire tenth floor of a prewar building, with tall ceilings and an elevator that opened onto their own private landing. Each of the girls had her own room, both with twin beds in case of a sleepover. They shared a full bath that could be closed off by a pair of glass-paned doors hung with diaphanous pink and white curtains. A hallway led to a large eat-in kitchen, a maid’s room, and a bath off the kitchen. Further down the hall was the formal dining room, where a long mahogany table was surrounded by tall-backed mahogany chairs with cushions. A matching armoire held the finer dishware sets and flatware, their pale china set off by the warm dark wood. Another set of glass doors opened from the dining room into the living room, where a stereo often played classical music: one day baroque Bach, another day a Chopin concerto. A grand piano stood in one corner, and both girls had weekly lessons on it, in a nod to an earlier era of ladies’ manners and skills. A separate passageway off the foyer led to the master bedroom, which had a large, doorless, walk-in closet. The windows of the master bedroom and the adjoining bathroom looked out over a set of garden apartments in a row of lower-storied, once single-family brownstones, now apartment buildings. There, thin trees shadowed gardens bedecked with seasonal blooms and autumnal colors, brick walkways and patios.

The full-time maid, Dolores, did most of the cooking and looked after the girls when Mrs. Carrington was out. Occasionally, an ethnic flavor crept into the suppers—a chicken burrito, maybe, or a codfish taco. Weekly floral arrangements were delivered, befitting the changing seasons: tall lilac branches in the spring, holly or poinsettias at Christmas time. The computer-coding business was booming, so Mr. Carrington was busy at work. Mrs. Carrington immersed herself in philanthropy, donating to the Catholic Charities of New York and serving on volunteer committees, such as the movement to plant more trees in the city. The girls attended the Brearley School for Girls. They complained because it was an all-girls school, but the parents insisted. Public schools in Manhattan would simply not do.  They promised, however, that this sojourn in the city was only temporary. Once Mr. Carrington’s business became a bit more stable and he had his staff in place for the New York office, they would return to Lenox, in Massachusetts, where the girls could attend the public (and co-educational) high school.

Emily hated New York City. The tall buildings made her seem insignificantly tiny. She felt assaulted by the smells, the noise, the volume of traffic. Everything made her anxious. It was like the downtown parts of Tokyo—Ginza or Shinjuku, for example. The residential area where they had lived was different; they had occupied a single-family home with a garden and a gate, on a quiet street with almost no traffic. Everyone had commuted to the rail stations or bus stops by bicycle. In New York, one lived in the middle of downtown even here on the upper East Side.

Claire withheld judgment. She liked the energy of the city—its pulse, you might say. And she liked the anonymity of being one New Yorker among countless others. You disappeared.

My little sister, Claire, has always talked about the old Japanese lady that she—and only she—can see. She suffers from hallucinations, always has. As soon as she started talking, she began rambling about this old lady with long hair who would appear to her. She’d point and say, “There. See?” at nothing. We all figured it was just an imaginary “friend”—unusual as it might sound for a little girl to invent an old woman for a companion. The strange thing is that she never stopped seeing this woman. As Claire herself is apt to point out, small children can’t distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality, but this vision seems not to have yielded to an adult understanding of what is real.

It makes me doubt her sanity. Is she psychotic? Schizophrenia, as I understand it, manifests for most people in early adulthood, the late teens to early twenties. There is such a thing as childhood schizophrenia, but it’s really rare. As Claire would tell you (she studied psychology), it often appears in cases of multiple personalities, in which severe sexual or other trauma occurs before the ego consolidates into a single entity, bounded and inviolate—before a child understands and experiences itself as a whole, individual person.

But none of this applies to Claire. And beyond these visions, she is functional: she was an A student, completed several years of graduate studies, and now flies around the world interpreting for Japanese television and film. She doesn’t experience blank chunks of time, memory lapses, or other incongruous behavior. So I just think of her as a little bit crazy. If you didn’t know she hallucinated, you’d never find out now—she no longer lets on about it. Keeps her secrets. It’s bizarre to me, that she can have her visions but still function in the world like anyone else. I worry that one day she’ll get lost in them and never come back to the real world. In fact, it terrifies me.

The old woman that Claire has been seeing since childhood is a yamamba, the mountain witch of Japanese folklore and ancient dramas. She’s an old hag who lives in the mountains, enticing and sometimes devouring hapless male travelers who wander into her abode. There are many and varied tales of the yamambas’ origins: they were once human but then got transformed into ogres of sorts; they are downfallen deities; they are old women who were “thrown away,” abandoned in the mountains because their families could no longer afford to feed them. In every story, they’re outcasts of sorts, hovering at the threshold of human and monster. When we were kids in Japan, we heard all kinds of scary yamamba tales. So why would Claire fixate on this archetype? Beats me. And she began to see her before we even went to Japan, so it can’t just be a child’s predilection to imagine things.

She used to have an uncanny ability to predict future events, I have to admit. It scared me. She’d say something like “Grandma Ruth’s going to get sick,” and then Grandma would have a stroke. Or it might be something as banal as “We’re going to have beef shabu-shabu tomorrow.” She could have asked Mom or Dolores for shabu-shabu in the latter case, but nothing can explain the former.

Then there was the time when my daughter, Rachel, was four years old and Joe and I took a short vacation with her, in a little log cabin by an isolated stream in the Berkshires. Rachel somehow managed to wander off by herself, out of the cabin, during the night. We were awakened by the phone ringing. It was Claire, calling the number we had given her. Without preamble she ordered, “Go find Rachel. She’s sitting on a log near your cabin.” In a panic, we looked in Rachel’s room, and she wasn’t there. Joe opened the door, and there she was, sitting on a nearby log. It was uncanny.

Rachel didn’t say anything about what had happened that night for more than a week. She would just shut down when we asked her why she had left the cabin in the middle of the night. About ten days afterward, she said, finally, “I heard a lady calling to me to come outside.” That was all. We figured she must have been dream-walking. The strangest part, of course, was Claire’s phone call. When I asked Claire how she had known where to find Rachel, she answered, “It came to me in a dream. The yamamba told me.”

When Claire was twenty-seven, she wondered if her entire life was only a hallucination, like the worlds reported by the schizophrenic women whom she looked after at the mental hospital, once they awoke from catatonic states. DISSYMETRY opens with Claire and widens out to encompass the stories of five very different yet intertwined women: clairvoyant Claire; her wealthy sister, Emily; Emily’s daughter, Rachel; Emily’s working-class neighbor, Jane; and Jane’s lesbian sister, Rose. Told in shifting first- and third-person narration, the novel interweaves the present and the past, depicting how a circle of women undergoing different traumas come together to create a healing community. It contains several important leitmotifs: food, which acts as a pharmakon, poison to Rose, who is recovering from anorexia, but nurturance for the mothers; women’s domestic spaces; the trope of the Japanese mountain witch; and Japanese culture and aesthetics. It also explores diverse sexual identities, racism, and wealth versus poverty.

I expect that the novel will be of interest to feminists and women in general, those interested in psychology and healing, and those with an interest in Japan. The novel at times employs an omniscient narrative voice, using these moments to distance the reader from the characters with humor and elaborate attention to detail, inspired by, for example, Elizabeth Bowen and Marcel Proust.