The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  ‘You must be tired,’ said Kikuko, a shadow passing over her face.

  ‘I am. Today someone came to see me in the office. I took a puff on a cigarette and laid it down and lighted another and laid it down, and I saw that there were three of them, lighted and almost unsmoked. It was very embarrassing.’

  He had thought on the train of sending his head to a laundry, it was true, but he had been drawn not so much to the idea of the laundered head as to that of the sleeping body. A very pleasant sleep, with head detached. There could be no doubt of it: he was tired.

  He had had two dreams toward dawn this morning and the dead had figured in both.

  ‘Aren’t you taking a vacation this summer?’

  ‘I’d thought of going to Kamikochi. There’s no one I can leave my head with, and so I think I’d like to go have a look at the mountains.’

  ‘Oh, go, by all means,’ said Kikuko, a little too gaily.

  ‘But we have Fusako with us now. She’s come for a rest too. What do you think? Would it be better for her with me in the house, or away?’

  ‘I envy her, having such a good father.’ Kikuko did not seem wholly at ease.

  Had he hoped, he wondered, to badger her, throw her off the scent, distract her from the image of his own solitary figure, coming home without his son? Such had not been his conscious intention; and yet he wondered.

  ‘Are you being sarcastic?’ he asked.

  He spoke lightly, but Kikuko seemed surprised.

  ‘Take a look at Fusako and then tell me whether I’ve been a good father.’

  She flushed to the ears. ‘It wasn’t your fault about Fusako,’ she said, and he felt consolation in her voice.

  3

  Shingo disliked cold drinks even in hot weather. Yasuko did not give them to him, and the habit of not taking them had formed over the years.

  In the morning when he got up and in the evening when he came home he would have a brimming cup of tea. Kikuko always saw to supplying it.

  When they got home from viewing the sunflowers she hurried for his tea. He drank about half of it, changed to a cotton kimono, and took his cup out to the veranda, sipping as he went. Kikuko came after him with a cold towel and cigarettes and poured more tea. Then she went for his glasses and the evening paper.

  He looked out at the garden. It seemed too much of an effort, when he had wiped his face, to put on his glasses.

  The grass was rough and untended. On the far side was a clump of bush clover and pampas grass, so tall that it almost looked wild.

  There were butterflies beyond. Shingo could see them flickering past gaps in the leaves, more than one butterfly, surely. He waited to see whether they would alight on the bush clover or come out from behind it. They went on fluttering through the leaves, however.

  He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery. The butterfly wings beyond the leaves of bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.

  He thought of the stars he had seen through the trees on the hilltop, that night a month earlier, when the moon had been near full.

  Yasuko came out and sat down beside him.

  ‘Shuichi will be late again?’ she asked, fanning herself.

  Shingo nodded and continued to look at the garden. ‘There are butterflies behind the shrubbery.’

  But as if they disliked being seen by Yasuko, the butterflies flew up over the bush clover. There were three of them.

  ‘Swallowtails.’

  For swallowtails they were small, and their color was somehow muddy.

  They cut a line diagonally across the board fence and emerged against the pine next door. Forming a vertical column, they proceeded, without breaking the column or changing the distance that separated them, up the middle of the tree to the top. It had grown untended, and did not have the shaped look of a garden tree.

  A moment later another swallowtail butterfly appeared from an unexpected quarter and, describing a horizontal line across the garden, skimmed the top of the bush clover.

  ‘This morning I had two dreams about dead people. The old man at the Tatsumiya treated me to noodles.’

  ‘You didn’t eat them, did you?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I have?’ Shingo wondered if eating food offered in a dream by a dead person meant that the dreamer himself would die. ‘I don’t really remember. I don’t think I did. I do remember that they were cold.’ He thought he must have awakened before eating.

  He could remember even the color of the noodles, laid on bamboo, in a frame lacquered black on the outside and red on the inside.

  He did not know, however, whether he had seen the color in the dream or assigned it upon awakening. In any case, the noodles were clear in his mind, though everything else was blurred.

  One helping of noodles had been laid on the floor, and it seemed that Shingo had been standing beside it. The shopkeeper and his family, it seemed, had been sitting down. It seemed that no one had had a cushion to sit on. It seemed, strangely, that Shingo alone had been standing. So much he could remember, but only vaguely.

  Awakening from the dream, he had remembered it clearly. After going back to sleep and getting up in the morning, he had remembered it even more clearly. Now, however, it was almost gone. The picture centering on the noodles had stayed in his mind, but he could not remember the plot, what had gone before and followed after.

  The man in the dream was a cabinetmaker who had died in his seventies some three or four years before. Because he was an artisan of the old school, Shingo had taken a great liking to him and given him considerable work. Yet he had not been such a close friend as to figure in a dream so long after his death.

  It seemed to Shingo that the noodles had appeared in the family quarters, at the back of the shop. Even though he might on occasion have stood outside talking to the old man, he could not remember having gone into the back rooms. He was puzzled to know why he should have had a dream in which noodles figured.

  The old man had had six children, all daughters.

  Shingo had slept with a girl in the dream, but now, in the evening, he could not remember whether or not it had been one of the daughters.

  He remembered clearly having touched someone, but he had no notion who she might have been. He could remember nothing that even gave him a hint.

  He felt that he had known who it was when he woke, and when, after going to sleep again, he had again awakened, he had perhaps still known. But now, in the evening, he could remember nothing at all.

  Since the dream was a continuation of the one about the old cabinetmaker, he tried to decide whether the girl he had slept with might have been one of the man’s daughters. No sort of awareness came to him. He could not even call up the faces of the Tatsumi daughters.

  It was a continuation, that much was clear; but he did not know what had gone before and come after the noodles. It now seemed likely that they had been the clearest image in his mind when he woke. Yet would it not be true to the laws of dreams if he had awakened at the shock of contact with the girl?

  Not, of course, that it had been a sharp enough sensation to wake him.

  Here, too, nothing definite of the dream remained. The figure had gone, and he could not bring it back; all that remained was a sense of physical disparity, a failure of physical contact.

  Shingo had not, in actuality, experienced such a woman. He had not recognized her, but because she had been a mere girl, the meeting could not have happened in real life.

  At sixty-two, an absence of sensual dreams would not be unusual, but what puzzled him now was the positive insipidity of it all.

  He had promptly gone back to sleep and had another dream.

  Fat old Aida had come around, a half-gallon bottle of sake in his hand. He had, it seemed, drunk a good bit already. The pores on his red face were agape.

  Shingo could remember no more of the dream. He did not know whether the house had been this one or a house he had lived in earlier.

&n
bsp; Aida had, until ten years or so before, been a director of Shingo’s company. He had died of apoplexy toward the end of the previous year. In his last years he had grown thin.

  ‘And then I had another dream. This time Aida came around to the house with a bottle.’

  ‘Mr Aida? But that’s strange. Mr Aida didn’t drink.’

  ‘That’s true. He had asthma, and when he had his stroke it was the mucus that killed him. But he didn’t drink. He was always wandering around with a medicine bottle in his hand.’

  And yet he had strode into the dream like a brave roisterer. The image floated up vividly in Shingo’s mind.

  ‘And did you and Mr Aida have a drinking party?’

  ‘I didn’t have a drop. Aida was walking toward me, but I woke up before he had a chance to sit down.’

  ‘It’s not very pleasant, dreaming of dead people.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve come for me.’

  He had reached an age when most of his friends were dead. It was perhaps natural that he should dream of the dead.

  Neither the old cabinetmaker nor Aida had appeared to him as dead, however. They had come into his dreams as living people.

  And the figures of both, as they had come into the dreams, were still vivid in his mind. They were much clearer than his usual memories of the two men. Aida’s face, red from drink, was of a sort that the living Aida had never presented; and yet Shingo remembered such details as the distended pores.

  Why should it be that, remembering the other two so clearly, he could not call up the face of the girl who had touched him, could not remember who she might be?

  He asked whether, from feelings of guilt, he had managed to forget. But such did not seem to be the case. He had not been awake long enough for more than a certain sensual disappointment.

  He was not especially interested in the fact that it had come to him in a dream.

  He did not describe this part of the dream to Yasuko. Kikuko and Fusako were getting dinner. He could hear their voices in the kitchen. They seemed a trifle too loud.

  4

  Every night locusts would come flying in from the cherry tree.

  Shingo walked over to the trunk of the tree.

  Engulfed by the sound of whirring wings, he looked up. He was astonished at the number of locusts, and astonished too at the noise of their wings. It was as if a flock of sparrows had started up.

  Locusts were flying off as he looked into the great tree.

  All the clouds in the sky were racing toward the east. The weather forecast had said that that most ominous of days, the two-hundred-tenth after the beginning of spring,* was likely to pass without incident, but Shingo suspected that there would be winds and showers to bring down the temperature.

  ‘Has something happened?’ Kikuko came up. ‘I heard locusts and wondered.’

  ‘They do make you think there might have been an accident, don’t they? You hear about the wings of ducks and geese, but these are just as impressive.’

  Kikuko was holding a needle and red thread. ‘It wasn’t the wings. It was the screeching all of a sudden, as if something might be threatening them.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed that so much.’

  He looked into the room from which she had come. Spread out in it were the makings of a child’s dress, the cloth from an ancient singlet of Yasuko’s. ‘Does Satoko still play with locusts?’

  Kikuko nodded. A faint motion of her lips seemed to shape the word ‘yes’.

  Locusts were strange and interesting creatures to Satoko, a child of the city; and there was something in her nature that responded to the sport. At first she had been afraid when Fusako had given her one to play with. Then Fusako had cut off the wings, and afterwards whenever the child caught a locust she would come running up to anyone nearby, Kikuko or Yasuko or whomever, to have the wings clipped.

  Yasuko hated the practice.

  Fusako had not always been that sort of girl, she grumbled. Her husband had ruined her.

  Yasuko had blanched when she found a swarm of red ants dragging off a wingless locust.

  She was not, on the whole, a person to be moved by such matters. Shingo was both amused and disturbed.

  Her recoil, as from a poisonous vapor, was perhaps a sign of some evil foreboding. Shingo suspected that locusts were not the problem.

  Satoko was an obdurate child, and when the adult in question had surrendered and cut the wings she would still be dawdling about. Then, with somber, shadowy eyes, she would throw the insect, its wings freshly cut, out into the garden, as if to hide it. She knew that adults would be watching her.

  Fusako apparently poured forth her complaints to Yasuko every day, but it seemed, from the fact that she never touched upon the question of when she would be leaving, that she had not yet brought herself to the heart of the matter.

  When they were in bed Yasuko would pass the day’s complaints on to Shingo. Though he did not pay a great deal of attention, he would feel that something had been left out.

  He knew that as her father he should step forward to give Fusako advice; but she was thirty and married, and matters are not simple for fathers in such cases. It would not be easy to accommodate a woman with two children. A decision was postponed from day to day, as if the principals were all waiting for nature to take its course.

  ‘Isn’t Father nice to Kikuko,’ said Fusako.

  Kikuko and Shuichi were both at the dinner table.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Yasuko. ‘I try to be good to her myself.’

  Fusako’s manner had not suggested that she required an answer. There was laughter in the tone of Yasuko’s gratuitous answer, but it was meant to quell Fusako all the same.

  ‘After all, she’s good to us.’

  Kikuko turned crimson.

  Yasuko’s second remark was uncomplicated enough. It contained something like a thrust at her daughter, however.

  It seemed to suggest that she liked her happy daughter-in-law and disliked her unhappy daughter. One might have suspected cruelty and malice. Shingo sensed something like self-loathing too. He detected a similar vein in himself. Yet it seemed strange to him that Yasuko, woman and aging mother, should have given way to it in the presence of her daughter.

  ‘I don’t agree that she’s all that kind,’ said Shuichi. ‘She’s not to her husband.’ The joke was not successful.

  It should have been clear to all of them, to Shuichi and Yasuko as well as to Kikuko herself, that Shingo was particularly gentle toward Kikuko. The fact scarcely needed mentioning, and somehow mention of it saddened him.

  Kikuko was for him a window looking out of a gloomy house. His blood kin were not as he would wish them to be, and if they were not able to live as they themselves wished to live, then the impact of the blood relation became leaden and oppressive. His daughter-in-law brought relief.

  Kindness toward her was a beam lighting isolation. It was a way of pampering himself, of bringing a touch of mellowness into his life.

  For her part, Kikuko did not indulge in dark conjectures on the psychology of the aged, nor did she seem afraid of him.

  Fusako’s remark, he felt, brushed against his secret.

  It had been made at dinner some three or four evenings before.

  Under the cherry tree, Shingo thought of it, and of Satoko and the locust wings.

  ‘Is Fusako having a nap?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kikuko looked into his face. ‘She’s giving Kuniko hers.’

  ‘She’s a funny child, Satoko. Whenever Fusako gives the baby its nap she goes along and lies there clinging to her mother’s back. That’s when she behaves.’

  ‘It’s sweet, really.’

  ‘Yasuko can’t stand the child. But when she gets to be fourteen or fifteen she’ll be snoring away, the image of her grandmother.’

  Kikuko did not seem to understand.

  She called after Shingo as he turned to go off.

  ‘You went dancing?’

  ‘What?’ Shingo looked around. ‘Yo
u know about it, do you?’

  Two nights earlier he had gone to a dance hall with the girl from his office.

  Today was Sunday; so it would appear that the girl, Tanizaki Eiko, had told Shuichi the day before, and Shuichi had passed the news on to Kikuko.

  Shingo had not been dancing in years. The girl had clearly been surprised at his invitation. She had said that if she went out with him troublesome rumors would spread through the office, and he had said that she only needed to keep quiet. And it seemed that she had promptly told Shuichi.

  Shuichi, for his part, had neither yesterday nor today given Shingo a hint that he knew.

  Eiko evidently went dancing with Shuichi from time to time. Shingo had asked her out because he had thought he might see Shuichi’s mistress at the hall the two frequented.

  He had not, however, been able to find a likely girl, and he had not been up to asking Eiko for an identification.

  Apparently the surprise had made the girl a bit giddy. The note of discord struck Shingo as dangerous and touching.

  Although in her early twenties, she had tiny breasts, barely enough to fill one’s cupped hands. Shingo was put in mind of an erotic print by Harunobu.

  Given the noisy surroundings, he was somehow amused by the association.

  ‘Next time let me take you,’ he said to Kikuko.

  ‘Yes. Please do.’

  She had been blushing from the time she called him back.

  Had she guessed that he had gone in the hope of seeing Shuichi’s mistress?

  He had no particular reason to keep the incident a secret, but the thought of the other women left him a little flustered.