The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  The Sound of the Mountain

  Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned at the age of two. His first stories were published while he was still in high school and he decided to become a writer. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year later made his first impact on Japanese letters with ‘Izu Dancer’. He soon became a leading figure of the lyrical school that offered the chief challenge to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s. Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) brought him international recognition and he was the recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature. Kawabata died by his own hand on 16 April 1972.

  The Sound of the Mountain is translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (1921–2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese literature.

  The Sound of the Mountain

  YASUNARI KAWABATA

  Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1970

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Copyright © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1970

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-95035-8

  Contents

  The Sound of the Mountain

  The Wings of the Locust

  A Blaze of Clouds

  The Chestnuts

  A Dream of Islands

  The Cherry in the Winter

  Water in the Morning

  The Voice in the Night

  The Bell in Spring

  The Kite’s House

  A Garden in the Capital

  The Scar

  In the Rain

  The Cluster of Mosquitoes

  The Snake’s Egg

  Fish in Autumn

  Note on the pronunciation of Japanese names

  Consonants are pronounced approximately as in English, except that ‘g’ is always hard, as in Gilbert. Vowels are pronounced as in Italian. Also as in Italian, the final g is always sounded. Thus the name Kaname is pronounced Kah-nah-meh. There is no heavy penultimate accent as in English; it is adequate to accent each syllable equally.

  The Japanese name order has been followed throughout this translation, with the family name first.

  The Sound of the Mountain

  1

  Ogata Shingo, his brow slightly furrowed, his lips slightly parted, wore an air of thought. Perhaps to a stranger it would not have appeared so. It might have seemed rather that something had saddened him.

  His son Shuichi knew what was happening. It happened so frequently that he gave it little thought.

  Indeed, more was apparent to him than the simple fact that his father was thinking. He knew that his father was trying to remember something.

  Shingo took off his hat and, absently holding it in his right hand, set it on his knee. Shuichi put it on the rack above them.

  ‘Let me see. What was it, I wonder?’ At such times Shingo found speech difficult. ‘What was the name of the maid that left the other day?’

  ‘You mean Kayo?’

  ‘Kayo. That was it. And when was it that she left?’

  ‘Last Thursday. That would make it five days ago.’

  ‘Five days ago? Just five days ago she quit, and I can’t remember anything about her.’

  To Shuichi his father’s performance seemed a trifle exaggerated.

  ‘That Kayo – I think it must have been two or three days before she quit. When I went out for a walk I had a blister on my foot, and I said I thought I had picked up ringworm. “Footsore,” she said. I liked that. It had a gentle, old-fashioned ring to it. I liked it very much. But now that I think about it I’m sure she said I had a boot sore. There was something wrong with the way she said it. Say “footsore”.’

  ‘Footsore.’

  ‘And now say “boot sore”.’

  ‘Boot sore.’

  ‘I thought so. Her accent was wrong.’

  Of provincial origins, Shingo was never very confident about standard Tokyo pronunciation. Shuichi had grown up in Tokyo.

  ‘It had a very pleasant sound to it, very gentle and elegant, when I thought she said “footsore”. She was there in the hallway. And now it occurs to me what she really said, and I can’t even think of her name. I can’t remember her clothes or her face. I imagine she was with us six months or so?’

  ‘Something of the sort.’ Used to these problems, Shuichi offered his father no sympathy.

  Shingo was accustomed enough to them himself, and yet he felt a twinge of something like fear. However hard he tried to remember the girl, he could not summon her up. There were times when such futile searchings were leavened by sentimentality.

  So it was now. It had seemed to him that Kayo, leaning slightly forward there in the hallway, was consoling him for being footsore.

  She had been with them six months, and he could call up only the memory of that single word. He felt that a life was being lost.

  2

  Yasuko, Shingo’s wife, was sixty-three, a year older than he.

  They had a son, a daughter, and two grandchildren, daughters of the girl, Fusako.

  Yasuko was young for her age. One would not have taken her to be older than her husband. Not that Shingo himself seemed particularly old. They seemed natural together, he just enough older than she to make them a most ordinary couple. Though diminutive, she was in robust health.

  Yasuko was no beauty. In their younger years she had looked older than he, and had disliked being seen in public with him.

  Shingo could not have said at what age she had begun to look the younger of the two. Probably it had been somewhere toward their mid-fifties. Women generally age faster than men, but in their case the reverse had been true.

  The year before, the year he had entered his second cycle of sixty years, Shingo had spat up blood – from his lungs, it had seemed. He had not had a medical examination, however, and presently the affliction had gone away. It had not come back.

  Nor had it meant that he grew suddenly older. His skin had seemed firmer since, and in the two weeks or so that he had been in bed the color of his eyes and lips had improved.

  Shingo had not detected symptoms of tuberculosis in himself, and to spit blood at his age gave him the darkest forebodings. Partly because of
them he refused to be examined. To Shuichi such behavior was no more than the stubborn refusal of the aged to face facts. Shingo was not able to agree.

  Yasuko was a good sleeper. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Shingo would be tempted to blame her snoring for having awakened him. She had snored, it seemed, as a girl of fifteen or sixteen, and her parents had been at great pains to correct the habit; it had stopped when she married. Then, when she passed fifty, it had begun again.

  When she snored Shingo would twist her nose in an effort to stop her. If the twisting had no effect, he would take her by the throat and shake her. On nights when he was not in good spirits he would be repelled by the sight of the aged flesh with which he had lived for so long.

  Tonight he was not in good spirits. Turning on the light, he looked at her profile and took her by the throat. She was a little sweaty.

  Only when she snored did he reach out to touch her. The fact seemed to him infinitely saddening.

  He took up a magazine lying at his pillow. Then, the room being sultry, he got up, opened a shutter, and sat down beside it.

  The moon was bright.

  One of his daughter-in-law’s dresses was hanging outside, unpleasantly gray. Perhaps she had forgotten to take in her laundry, or perhaps she had left a sweat-soaked garment to take the dew of night.

  A screeching of insects came from the garden. There were locusts on the trunk of the cherry tree to the left. He had not known that locusts could make such a rasping sound; but locusts indeed they were.

  He wondered if locusts might sometimes be troubled with nightmares.

  A locust flew in and lit on the skirt of the mosquito net. It made no sound as he picked it up.

  ‘A mute.’ It would not be one of the locusts he had heard at the tree.

  Lest it fly back in, attracted by the light, he threw it with all his strength toward the top of the tree. He felt nothing against his hand as he released it.

  Gripping the shutter, he looked toward the tree. He could not tell whether the locust had lodged there or flown on. There was a vast depth to the moonlit night, stretching far on either side.

  Though August had only begun, autumn insects were already singing.

  He thought he could detect a dripping of dew from leaf to leaf.

  Then he heard the sound of the mountain.

  It was a windless night. The moon was near full, but in the moist, sultry air the fringe of trees that outlined the mountain was blurred. They were motionless, however.

  Not a leaf on the fern by the veranda was stirring.

  In these mountain recesses of Kamakura the sea could sometimes be heard at night. Shingo wondered if he might have heard the sound of the sea. But no – it was the mountain.

  It was like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth. Thinking that it might be in himself, a ringing in his ears, Shingo shook his head.

  The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death was approaching. He wanted to question himself, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound, he was sure. He had heard the mountain.

  It was as if a demon had passed, making the mountain sound out.

  The steep slope, wrapped in the damp shades of night, was like a dark wall. So small a mound of a mountain, that it was all in Shingo’s garden; it was like an egg cut in half.

  There were other mountains behind it and around it, but the sound did seem to have come from that particular mountain to the rear of Shingo’s house.

  Stars were shining through the trees at its crest.

  As he closed the shutter, a strange memory came to him.

  Some ten days before, he had been awaiting a guest at a newly built restaurant. A single geisha was with him. The guest was late, and so were the other geisha.

  ‘Why don’t you take off your tie?’ she said. ‘You must be warm.’

  Shingo nodded, and let her take it off for him.

  She was not a geisha with whom he was particularly familiar, but when she had folded the tie and put it into the pocket of his coat, which lay beside the alcove, the conversation moved on to personal matters.

  Some two months before, she said, she had been on the point of committing suicide with the carpenter who had built the restaurant. But as they had prepared to take poison, doubts had overtaken her. Were the portions in fact lethal?

  ‘He said there was plenty. The doses were all measured out, his and mine, he said, and that proved it.’

  But she could not believe him. Her doubts only grew.

  ‘I asked him who did the measuring. Someone might have measured out just enough to make us sick and teach us a lesson. I asked him who the druggist or doctor was that gave it to him, but he wouldn’t say. Isn’t that strange? There we were, going to die together. Why wouldn’t he answer me? After all, who was to know afterwards?’

  ‘A good yarn,’ Shingo had wanted to say.

  And so she had insisted, she went on, that they try again after she had found someone to do the measuring.

  ‘I have it here with me.’

  Shingo thought the story an odd one. All that had really stayed with him was the fact that the man was a carpenter and had built the restaurant.

  The geisha had taken two packets from her purse and opened them for him.

  He had only glanced at them. He had had no way of knowing whether or not they were poison.

  As he closed the shutter, he thought of the geisha.

  He went back to bed. He did not wake his wife to tell her of the fear that had come over him on hearing the sound of the mountain.

  3

  Shuichi and Shingo worked for the same firm. The son served as a sort of prompter for the father.

  There were other prompters too, Yasuko and Kikuko, Shuichi’s wife. The three of them worked together, a team supplementing Shingo’s powers of memory. The girl in the office was yet another prompter.

  Coming into Shingo’s office, Shuichi took a book from the small stand in one corner and began leafing through it.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. He went over to the girl’s desk and pointed to an open page.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Shingo, smiling. Shuichi brought the book to him.

  ‘One is not to understand that the sense of chastity has here been lost,’ said the passage in question. ‘We have but a device for loving longer. A man unable to bear the pain of loving a woman, a woman unable to bear the pain of loving a man – they should go happily out in search of other partners, and so find a way to make their hearts more steadfast.’

  ‘Where is “here”?’

  ‘Paris. It’s a novelist’s account of his trip to Europe.’

  Shingo’s mind was no longer as alive as it had once been to aphorism and paradox. This seemed to him, however, neither of the two. It seemed, more simply, penetrating insight.

  Shuichi had probably not been moved by the passage. He had found a way, on the spur of the moment, for signaling to the girl that he wanted her to go out with him after work.

  As he got off the train in Kamakura, Shingo found himself wishing that he had come home with Shuichi, or perhaps later.

  The bus was crowded with commuters. He decided to walk.

  The fishmonger nodded a greeting as Shingo stood outside the shop. He went in. The water in the tub of prawns was a cloudy white. He prodded a lobster. It should have been alive, but it did not move. He decided on whelks, of which there was a good supply.

  When asked how many he wanted, however, he was perplexed.

  ‘Well, make it three. Three of the biggest ones.’

  ‘Shall I dress them for you, sir?’

  The fishmonger and his son dug out the meat with butcher knives. Shingo disliked the sound of scraping against the shell.

  As the man washed and cut the meat, two girls stopped in front of the shop.

  ‘What will you have?�
� he asked, going on with the dicing.

  ‘Herring.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘One?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just one?’

  The herring were not the smallest possible, but they were little larger than minnows. The girl did not seem to be especially put off by this show of disapproval, however.

  The man took up the herring in a bit of paper and handed it to her.

  ‘But we didn’t need any fish,’ said the second girl, hanging over the other and prodding her elbow.

  ‘I wonder if they’ll still be here on Saturday,’ said the other. She was looking at the lobsters. ‘My boyfriend sort of likes them.’

  The second girl did not answer.

  Startled, Shingo ventured a glance.

  Prostitutes of the new sort, they had bare backs, cloth shoes, and good figures.

  The fishmonger collected the diced meat at the center of his board and, dividing it in three parts, began to put it back into the shells.

  ‘We’re getting more and more of their kind. Even here in Kamakura.’

  His asperity struck Shingo as most odd. ‘But I thought they were behaving rather well,’ he said, protesting against he hardly knew what.

  Casually, the man was putting the meat back into the shells, so mixed together, thought Shingo, that it was unlikely to be reassembled in the particular shells from which it had come. He was aware of very small niceties.

  Today was Thursday. Two more days until Saturday – but then, he told himself, there were plenty of lobsters to be had these days. He wondered how the uncouth maiden would prepare lobster for her American friend. A lobster made a simple, uncouth dish, however, fried or boiled or roasted.

  Shingo had felt well disposed toward the girls, and yet afterwards he was taken with vague feelings of despondency.

  There were four in his family, but he had bought only three whelks. He had not acted precisely out of consideration for Kikuko, although he had of course known that Shuichi would not be home for dinner. He had simply deleted Shuichi.