The Sound of the Mountain

Shingo’s Inner Life

The novel opens with a sound. Shingo, sixty-two years old, wakes in the night and hears what he takes to be the sound of the mountain—a deep, encompassing resonance that he understands immediately as a premonition of his own death. He does not speak of it to his wife. He lies in the dark with it and then it passes and life continues.

This is Kawabata’s method across the novel: something is felt with absolute certainty, and then life continues around it without acknowledging what has occurred. Shingo’s inner life is full of these quiet catastrophes. He is losing his memory—names, faces, the thread of recent conversations—in ways he notices with the careful attention of a man who has spent his life observing. He dreams of dead friends, of his wife’s sister who died young and who was more beautiful than his wife and whom, he understands now, he loved. He dreams of Kikuko, his daughter-in-law, with a tenderness that slides in the dream into something else.

Kawabata renders this inner life with a precision that has no equivalent in Japanese fiction. The dreams are reported in the same register as the waking observations—neither more nor less real, neither explained nor pathologized. Shingo moves through his days with the heightened receptivity of someone who knows that the days are numbered, noticing the light on the garden, the behavior of the insects, the way a woman arranges flowers.

The Family

The household arrangement that the novel inhabits is worth mapping carefully. Shingo and his wife Yasuko have been married for decades in a relationship that has long since settled into a kind of companionable indifference. Their son Shuichi works in Tokyo, maintains a mistress, and treats his wife Kikuko with a casual cruelty that he doesn’t examine. Their daughter Fusako’s marriage has collapsed—her husband has left—and she has returned to the family home with her two children, bringing her bitterness with her.

Into this arrangement, Kikuko shines with a quality that Shingo cannot name and does not try to. He is more careful with her than with anyone else in his life. He worries about her happiness in a way he no longer worries about his wife’s. He brings her gifts. He finds reasons to walk with her, to speak with her privately. What he feels for her is not desire in any form he could act on or recognize—it is something between the love a father cannot give his own son and the love for a woman he will never be young enough to have. Kawabata refuses to resolve or condemn it.

Postwar Japan

The Sound of the Mountain was published serially between 1949 and 1954, in the years immediately following Japan’s defeat and occupation. Kawabata does not write about the war directly—there are no battle scenes, no politics—but postwar Japan is everywhere in the texture of daily life that Shingo moves through.

The bombed and rebuilt cities. The young men who returned from the war changed in ways their families cannot account for. The old social arrangements—the obligations between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, employers and employees—under pressure from new freedoms that nobody has been taught to use. Shuichi’s casual infidelity, Fusako’s failed marriage, the young people who seem unmoored from the traditions that gave Shingo’s generation its shape: all of this registers as the specific social weather of defeated, modernizing Japan.

Many critics and readers consider The Sound of the Mountain Kawabata’s greatest novel—more sustained than Snow Country, more complex than Thousand Cranes, more honest about the interior of a consciousness than anything else in his work. The case is a strong one.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Kawabata’s most psychologically inhabited novel: an old man’s tenderness and approaching death rendered with a precision and compassion that makes this arguably his greatest work.