Yasunari Kawabata’s ‘The Sound Of the Mountain’ is a complex tale of a family, old age and death. With his minimalistic and precise prose, Kawabata takes us deep into the complex relationships of the family of Ogata Shingo. Ogata Shingo and his wife, Yasuko, live with their son Shuichi and daughter in law, Kikuko, in Kamakura. The seemingly well to do and close-knit family has its own share of secrets with the son, Shuichi, having an affair with a war widow and Shingo’s daughters, Fusako, marriage which is crumbling. The tale is about Shingo’s reaction to all that which takes and his own inability to change the course of things.
One of the key questions asked in the novel is, ‘What constitutes success from a human point of view?”. Shingo feels that his life is not successful since his children have major problems and he holds himself responsible for their shortcomings. He loves his son and has a troubled relationship with his daughter. The daughter holds him responsible for her state of affairs, wherein the person she married turns out to be a drug dealer and she now has to divorce him. In the meanwhile, Shingo, who adores his daughter in law, is unable to tell his son strongly to end his affair. He tries setting things right in other ways but without much success.
Kawabata’s success lies in making each of these characters very real. Initially, you feel that the daughter in law character may turn out to cloyingly sweet, as in some Indian movies. While she is indeed a nice person, Kawabata ensures she has her own self-respect and the most important step she takes, which shocks her parents in law, suddenly illuminates her character brilliantly. Similarly, we can easily relate to other characters in the novel, including the secretary Eiko, who tries her best to help the family.
The novel is also a meditation on old age and death. The novel starts with Shingo forgetting the name of a maid and then he hears the Sound of the mountain. He keeps having strange dreams about various people in his life. These dreams take us into the heart of Shingo. Additionally, we see Shingo thinking of death as most of the friends start dying. One of the friends, who is dying of cancer, requests Shingo to get in touch with another friend who can supply Potassium Cyanide. He cannot bear the pain of cancer and wants to kill himself. Old age and death keep repeating throughout the novel with Kawabata bringing to fore questions like ‘How do people deal with old age’? and ‘Does memory of an incident vanish once everyone involved in the incident vanishes?’ Some of the questions trouble us a lot.
At another level, the novel is about memory. Shingo cannot let go the fact that he was in awe and secretly in love with his wife’s sister. His sister in law was a beautiful woman who died young, after being married to a handsome man. Even after he has turned sixty, Shingo recalls how he felt inadequate in front of his sister in laws husband. Shingo’s dreams and nightmares are all about memory. He is not even sure on why some memory floats up now and an almost forgotten person is resurrected in the dream.
The memory of war is another hidden theme within the novel. The woman with whom Shuichi is having an affair is a war widow and she feels that the war has done injustice to her by taking away her husband early. Her character gives us an idea of what war widows faced in those days. She refuses to go to her husband’s family or to her own family after the death of her husband. Instead, she prefers to be independent and works to ensure she can have her own freedom. Even though she appears very briefly, you get a good idea of her character and her state of mind, by the way, that Kawata portrays her.
The novel has a smooth flow. Most of the novel seems to be about domestic discussions, reading papers and arranging flowers but nothing is wasted by Kawabata. Everything has a meaning and a purpose, even the seemingly mundane interactions. Major events happen once in a while and they are not described in any earth-shattering way. Rather they also fall in with the pace that Kawabata sets.
The novel is replete with descriptions of nature. You get to know the weather, the flowering of the trees, the sound of the wind and much more. A lot of these hold symbolic value but you can enjoy the descriptions as such, even if you do not get the symbolism.
The book I read was published by Penguin. Translation by Edward.G, Seidensticker. The translation is top class. It captures the spirit of the place, Kamakura, very well. It also captures the customs and mores of Japan quite well and the prose is precise and minimalistic.
This is a complex novel. Though it is only 200 and odd pages, it packs in a lot of thought and issues. This is a novel worthy of a Nobel Prize prize winner.
Originally published at mysteryofbooks.wordpress.com on January 26, 2019.
