The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

First published:Yama no oto, 1949-1954, serial; 1954, book (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: Kamakura, Tokyo, and Shinshu

Principal Characters:

• Shingo, an elderly businessman
• Yasuko, his wife
• Shuichi, their son
• Fusako, their daughter
• Kikuko, Shuichi’s wife

The Novel

The Sound of the Mountain narrates the events in the life of a certain elderly Japanese businessman, Shingo, and demonstrates the way these events impinge on and help shape his psychological states. Shingo, whose creeping senility is counterpoised by an ever more vivid memory of the past, seems to desire nothing more than to recede from the hubbub of daily life. Unfortunately, just as he might begin to indulge himself in idle philosophical contemplation, a pastime perhaps suited to one awaiting death, he finds himself embroiled in the most mundane of problems: the difficult and troubled marriages of his son and daughter.

Shuichi, Shingo’s son, is having an affair with a war widow and thus begins to neglect his wife, Kikuko. Since the young couple live in Kamakura with Shingo and his wife, Yasuko, the difficulties with the marriage are manifest and all the more disturbing to Shingo. He is distraught at what he regards as his son’s dissolute and immoral behavior, but of even greater concern to him is the health and well-being of his beautiful but delicate daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, Shingo’s daughter, Fusako, is also known to have marital problems; she may even have been beaten by her husband. After a period of some vacillation, she decides to move back to Kamakura to be with her parents, bringing her two young children with her. There, Fusako relinquishes her children to the care and supervision of Kikuko and appears to resign herself to a long and unhappy life. Shingo, troubled by his daughter’s bitterness and apathy, tries to embolden her with a sense of purpose and direction, but to no avail.

Shingo clings tenaciously to the hope that his children’s marriages will weather the storms that are besetting them and survive. Regardless of his children’s prospects for happiness, Shingo seems to uphold the institution of marriage: Although it cannot guarantee a happy life, he believes that marriage can at least provide the basis for a meaningful and moral one. This attitude, implicit in all that Shingo does or says, is clearly endorsed by Yasunari Kawabata. No doubt it reflects, in general, the difference between Japanese and Western attitudes with regard to the proper balance between social responsibility and self-realization. Shingo’s own marriage to Yasuko is really no less unhappy than the ones he tries to nurse back to health, but this is as much a fact to him as the reality and finality of death.

Kikuko, without the family’s knowledge, becomes pregnant and, for reasons of her own, has an abortion. When Shingo learns of the matter, he is shocked at Kikuko’s actions, but forgives her nevertheless. After all, it was Shuichi’s cruelty, he argues, which led to this tragedy. Still worse, because he had not intervened in time, Shingo cannot help but sense that he himself must carry some of the responsibility for the ill-conceived deed. Later, Shingo learns that Shuichi’s mistress also is expecting a baby. Motivated by a kind of poetic justice, he entreats her to have an abortion but is eventually haunted by the thought that, should the woman in fact accede to his request, he would be implicated in yet another murder.

Shuichi and his mistress become estranged. She leaves Tokyo for the provinces, apparently to have her baby. Meanwhile, Shuichi and Kikuko seem to be reestablishing a bond, making Shingo hopeful that their marriage will indeed survive. Fusako, on the other hand, remains unreconciled with her husband, who has barely survived a suicide attempt. The novel closes on a quiet note, with a dinner scene at which the family of seven must share three pieces of trout. Shingo, ignoring for the moment the signs of inharmonious cohabitation, proposes that the family go to the country soon to look at the maples.

The Characters

The protagonist, Shingo, is a man in his early sixties who is preoccupied with growing old. Incessantly, he reflects upon his encroaching ailments, shooting pains, and the deaths of old acquaintances. He is an aesthete and takes great pleasure in beauty. Whether it be the alluring charms of a woman, the finely sculpted features of a No mask, the bright colors of cherry blossoms, or the hue, aroma, and flavor of gyokuro tea, beauty, in all its manifestations, consoles and sustains Shingo. His aesthetic sense might be deemed peculiarly Oriental, for he shows little sign of discriminating between the aesthetic pleasures of art and those of nature. To Shingo, a devoted student of Japanese art and literature, a rock formation, butterfly, flower, or even pampas grass will, more often than not, suggest one or another of his favorite artistic works. There is, however, a dark underside of beauty of which Shingo is equally aware: its transient and evanescent nature, beyond which lurk dissolution, death, and decay.

Shingo strives to live a morally decent life as he sees it, but the effort he expends in doing so only seems to contribute to his feelings of guilt and inadequacy. His genuine and fatherly love for his daughter-in-law seems, to him, sullied and degraded by his finding in her a sexually appealing woman. Although he tries to assist Fusako through her periods of crisis, he is haunted by the plausible notion that at the heart of his daughter’s problem is a dearth of paternal care and affection. He married Yasuko—or so he remembers—to rescue her from the clutches of her cruel brother-in-law, yet he has withheld from her the very tenderness and affection which his marrying her had intended to restore. Shingo’s love of beauty and Yasuko’s lack thereof seem to be at the core of the problem. Shingo habitually recalls Yasuko’s beautiful sister, who is now long dead and with whom he was secretly infatuated. This woman is Shingo’s ideal, whose flesh-and-blood counterpart he restlessly and compulsively seeks. On learning that Kikuko has had an abortion, for example, he entertains the depressing thought that the baby might finally have turned out to be Yasuko’s sister incarnate.

The other characters are all subordinate to the protagonist, their roles essentially limited to fragments of Shingo’s consciousness. The character of Fusako, very sketchily drawn, serves mainly to remind Shingo of the colder side of his nature. Shuichi’s womanizing, although it excites Shingo’s sense of moral revulsion, also makes Shingo rueful of his own inexperience with women. Yasuko, an unremarkable and unattractive woman, is the reality of Shingo’s everyday existence, in marked contrast to her sister, who is now only the stuff of dreams. The beautiful Kikuko incessantly evokes the memory of Yasuko’s sister but is at the same time Shingo’s last link to the here and the now.

Critical Context

The Sound of the Mountain may be regarded as Kawabata’s most important work. The pared-down yet highly evocative prose of the novel as well as its focus on the subjective reality of the protagonist was anticipated as early as the mid-1920’s by Izu no odoriko (1926; The Izu Dancer, 1955), which established Kawabata’s reputation. That novel is not, however, characteristic of the writer’s early period, which is noted instead for its reliance upon imported Western forms. Kawabata was a leader of the so-called Neo-Perceptionists, a group of young writers who endeavored to modernize Japanese literature by exposing it to as many “isms” from the West as it could absorb.

Kawabata’s best works, however, shed all obvious Western influences and are noted for their very Oriental sensibility. In Yukiguni (1947; Snow Country, 1956), for example, a story of a country geisha is simply told with a structure and imagery that recall haiku and renga verse. Sembazura (1952; Thousand Cranes, 1958) is built around the tea ceremony of Zen Buddhist origin, yet it is also Kawabata’s most experimental postwar novel. Meijin (1954; The Master of Go, 1972) recounts the defeat of an aging go master once regarded as invincible, taking up as a main theme the dichotomy between the glorious but stuffy world of art and the perhaps more wholesome beauty of nature.

Though by no means single-handedly, The Sound of the Mountain has certainly called attention to the subtle and masterful craft at work in modern Japanese fiction. It treats such familiar themes as beauty, death, and traditional values with sensitivity and depth. The multitudinous aspects of nature, described with both passion and detachment, are the correlatives of Shingo’s shifting moods and states of mind. Thus Kawabata’s prose, bearing the characteristics of both naturalism and impressionism, resonates with symbolic meaning.

Bibliography

Backstead, Richard C. Kawabata and the Divided Self, 1972.

Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel, 1974.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Tsuruta, K. “Two Journeys in The Sound of the Mountain,” in Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel, 1976.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.