The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Shingo could not answer.

  ‘Do you know, Kikuko?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very odd. And here we all are living in Kamakura.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything in your newspapers, Mother?’

  ‘There might be.’ Yasuko passed them on to Kikuko. They were neatly folded and stacked. Yasuko kept one for herself. ‘I believe I did see something. But I was so struck by the piece about the old couple who left home that I forgot everything else. You saw it, I suppose?’ she asked Shingo.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A great benefactor of Japanese boat racing. The vice-chairman of the Japanese Rowing Association.’ She began to read the article, and then went on in her own words. ‘He was the president of a company that makes boats and yachts. He was sixty-nine, and she was sixty-eight.’

  ‘And what was there about it that struck you so?’

  ‘He left behind notes to their daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren. Here it is in the paper.’ Yasuko began reading again. ‘“Miserable old creatures, living our leftover lives, forgotten by the world? No, we have decided that we do not want to live so long. We quite understand the feelings of Viscount Takagi.* People should go away while they are still loved. We shall go now, still in the embrace of family affection, blessed with numbers of comrades and colleagues and schoolmates.” That’s to the daughter and son-in-law. And this is the one to the grandchildren: “The day of Japanese independence is approaching, but the way ahead is dark. If young students who know the horrors of war really want peace, then they must persist to the end in the nonviolent methods of Gandhi. We have lived too long and no longer have the strength to lead and to pursue the way we believe right. Were we to live idly on into ‘The Spiteful Years’,* then we would have made meaningless the years we have lived thus far. We want to leave behind memories of a good grandfather and grandmother. We do not know where we are going. We but go quietly off.”’

  Yasuko fell silent.

  Shingo turned aside, to look at the cherries in the garden.

  Yasuko was still looking at the newspaper. ‘They left their house in Tokyo and disappeared after they had visited his sister in Osaka. The sister is in her eighties.’

  ‘Did the wife leave a note?’

  ‘What?’ Yasuko looked up in surprise.

  ‘Didn’t the wife leave a note?’

  ‘The wife? The old woman?’

  ‘Of course. If they went off together, it would have been natural for the wife to leave a note too. Suppose you and I were to commit suicide. You’d have something you wanted to say, and write it down.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be necessary,’ said Yasuko briskly. ‘It’s when young people commit suicide that they both leave notes. They want to talk about the tragedy of being kept apart. What would I have to say? With a husband and wife it’s enough for the husband to leave a note.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘It would be different if I were to die by myself.’

  ‘I suppose you’d have mountains of pains and regrets.’

  ‘They wouldn’t matter. Not at my age.’

  Shingo laughed. ‘Comfortable remarks from an old woman who doesn’t plan to die and isn’t about to die. And Kikuko?’

  ‘Me?’ It was a low, hesitant voice.

  ‘Supposing you were to commit suicide with Shuichi. Would you want to leave a note?’

  He knew immediately that it had not been the thing to say.

  ‘I don’t know. I wonder how it would be.’ She looked at Shingo. The forefinger of her right hand was in her obi, as if to loosen it. ‘I have a feeling I’d want to say something to you, Father.’ Her eyes had a youthful moistness, and then there were tears in them.

  Yasuko had no intimations of death, thought Shingo, but Kikuko was not without them.

  Kikuko leaned forward. He thought she was about to collapse in tears, and then she got up.

  Yasuko looked after her. ‘Odd. She has nothing to cry about. Hysteria, that’s what it is. Plain hysteria.’

  Shingo unbuttoned his shirt and put his hand to his chest.

  ‘Is your heart pounding?’

  ‘No. The nipple itches. It’s hard and itches.’

  ‘Like a teen-age girl.’

  Shingo rubbed his left nipple with his forefinger.

  When a couple committed suicide together the husband left a note and the wife did not. Did the wife have the husband substitute for her, or act for the two in concert? The question had puzzled and interested Shingo as Yasuko read from the newspaper.

  Living together for long years, had the two become one? Had the old wife lost her identity, was she without a testament to leave behind?

  Was it that the woman, with no compulsion to die, went in attendance upon her husband, had her part in the husband’s testament, without bitterness, regrets, hesitation? It all seemed very odd to Shingo.

  But his own old wife had in fact said that if they were to commit suicide she would not need to leave a note. It would be enough for him to.

  A woman who went uncomplainingly to death with a man – there were times when the opposite was the case, but usually the woman followed the man. Somehow it startled Shingo that such a woman, grown old, should be here beside him.

  Kikuko and Shuichi had not been together long, and already they were having their troubles.

  It might be that he had been cruel to Kikuko, that he had injured her when he asked whether she would want to leave a note.

  He knew that she stood on a dangerous brink.

  ‘You’re too good to her. That’s why she cries over such silly things.’ said Yasuko. ‘You pamper her, and you’ve done not one single thing about the most important problem. It’s the same with Fusako.’

  Shingo was looking at the cherry tree, heavy with blossoms.

  Under the great cherry was a rich growth of yatsude.*

  Disliking yatsude, Shingo had meant to cut it away before the cherry bloomed; but there had been heavy snowfalls in March, and now the blossoms had come.

  Though he had cut it down three years ago, it had come back all the more luxuriantly. He had thought then that he should dig up the roots, and he had been right.

  Yasuko’s observations made him dislike the heavy green of the leaves all the more. Without the yatsude the cherry would stand alone, spreading until its branches fell in the four directions. It had spread well even with the yatsude crowding it.

  And it was so laden with blossoms that one wondered how a tree could bear so many.

  The blossoms floated up grandly in the light of the afternoon sky. Neither the shape of the tree nor its color was particularly strong, but one felt that it quite filled the sky. The blossoms were at their best. It was hard to think that they would fall.

  But two or three petals were constantly falling, and the ground was carpeted with them.

  ‘When you read that a young person has been killed or committed suicide, you just say to yourself it’s happened again,’ mused Yasuko. ‘But with old people it really hits you. “People should go away while they are still loved.”’ She had evidently read the article over two and three times. ‘The other day there was a story about a sixty-one-year-old man who brought his grandson down from Tochigi to put him in St Luke’s Hospital. The boy was seventeen and had had infantile paralysis. The grandfather carried the boy around on his back to show him Tokyo. But the boy absolutely refused to go to the hospital, and so finally the grandfather strangled him with a towel. It was in the paper the other day.’

  ‘Oh? I didn’t notice.’ Shingo’s answer was indifferent, but he remembered how deeply he had been impressed by the article about young girls and their abortions, how he had even dreamed of it.

  The difference between him and the old woman who was his wife was very considerable.

  2

  ‘Kikuko,’ called Fusako. ‘This sewing machine is always breaking the thread. Is something wrong with it? Come and have a look. It’s a Singer and ought to be a good machine. I
wonder if I’ve lost my touch. I wonder if maybe I’m hysterical.’

  ‘It might be going to pieces. I’ve had it since I was in school.’ Kikuko came into the room. ‘But it listens when I speak to it. Let me have a try.’

  ‘Oh? I get so nervous with Satoko hanging onto me. I’m always sewing her hand. Of course I don’t sew her hand, but she puts it up here like this, and while I’m watching the seam everything gets blurry and she and the cloth run together.’

  ‘You’re tired.’

  ‘Just as I said. Hysterical. You’re tired yourself. The only ones in this house who aren’t tired are Grandfather and Grandmother. Here Grandfather is in his sixties and he complains about an itching nipple. Ridiculous.’

  On her way back from the sick call in Tokyo, Kikuko had bought material for the two children.

  Fusako was at work on dresses, and well disposed toward Kikuko.

  Displeasure was plain on Satoko’s face, however, as Kikuko changed places with Fusako.

  ‘Aunt Kikuko bought the material, and now you’re going to have her sew it?’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Kikuko. She’s exactly like Aihara.’ Apologies did not come easily from Fusako.

  Kikuko put her hand on Satoko’s shoulder. ‘Get Grandfather to take you down to the Buddha. There will be a procession with little princes and all, and there will be dancing.’

  At Fusako’s urging, Shingo went out with Fusako and Satoko.

  As they walked down the main street of the Hase district, Shingo’s eye was caught by a dwarf camellia before a tobacco shop. Buying a package of Hikari cigarettes, he offered a word of praise. The blossoms, of which there were five or six, were double, with crinkly petals.

  No, replied the tobacconist. Double blossoms were not right for dwarf trees. One should stay with the single-petalled wild camellia. He led them to the garden behind. Dwarf trees in pots were lined up by a vegetable patch some four or five yards square. The wild camellia was an old tree with a powerful trunk.

  ‘I’ve pinched off the buds,’ the man said. ‘It wouldn’t do to wear the tree out.’

  ‘It does have buds?’

  ‘Plenty of them. But I leave very few. The one out in front must have had twenty or thirty.’

  The man talked of the techniques of dwarfing, and of people in Kamakura with a fondness for dwarf trees. Shingo had frequently seen them in shop windows.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, leaving the shop. ‘I envy you.’

  ‘I don’t have any really good ones, but the wild camellia does have its points. You get yourself a tree, and then you’re responsible for seeing that it doesn’t die or lose its shape. It’s good medicine for laziness.’

  Shingo lit one of the cigarettes he had just bought. ‘It has the Buddha on it,’ he said, handing the package to Fusako. ‘Especially made for Kamakura.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Satoko stretched for the cigarettes.

  ‘You remember last fall when you ran away from home and went off to Shinano?’

  ‘I did not run away from home.’

  ‘Were there any dwarf trees in the old house?’

  ‘I didn’t see any.’

  ‘Probably not. It must be forty years ago. The old man was addicted to dwarf trees. Yasuko’s father. But you know how Yasuko is, and he preferred her sister. It was her sister he had help him with the trees. She was such a beauty that you’d never have dreamed she was Yasuko’s sister. I can see her now, dressed in a red kimono, bangs on her forehead, going down of a morning when snow was piled on the shelves to brush it away from the branches. I can see it right here in front of me, all fresh and clean. Shinano is cold, and her breath was white.’

  The white breath was scented with the softness of the young girl.

  Sunk in memories, Shingo was taking advantage of the fact that Fusako, of a different generation, was not interested.

  ‘I imagine that camellia has been at it for more than forty years.’ It seemed to be of a venerable age. How many years would it take for a dwarfed trunk to become like flexed biceps?

  The maple that had glowed red on the altar after Yasuko’s sister died – would it, in someone’s hands, still be alive?

  3

  When the three came to the temple precincts, the ‘procession of little princes’ was weaving its way up the flagstone walk before the Great Buddha. The little boys had walked a considerable distance, it seemed. Some of them were exhausted.

  Fusako lifted Satoko to see over the wall of people. Satoko gazed at the boys in their flowery kimonos.

  Having heard that there was a stone in the precincts bearing a poem by Yosano Akiko,* they went behind the statue to look for it. It seemed to be in Akiko’s own hand, enlarged, and carved on the stone.

  ‘I see it has Sakyamuni,’ said Shingo.

  He was astounded that Fusako did not know this most famous of poems.

  Akiko had written:

  A summer grove, Kamakura; a Buddha he may be,

  But a handsome man he also is, Lord Sakyamuni.

  ‘But the Great Buddha isn’t a Sakyamuni. He’s actually an Amitabha. Seeing that she had made a mistake, she rewrote the poem, but by that time the Sakyamuni version was too well known, and to change it to the Great Buddha or something of the sort would spoil the rhythm – and bring in Buddha twice. But it is a mistake. A mistake carved on stone, right here in front of us.’

  Ceremonial tea was being served in a curtained-off space near the stone. Kikuko had given Fusako tickets.

  The tea in the open sunlight had its own special color. Shingo wondered whether Satoko too would drink it. Satoko clutched at the edge of the bowl with one hand. It was a most ordinary bowl, but Shingo reached to help her.

  ‘It’s bitter.’

  ‘Bitter?’

  Even before she had tasted the tea, Satoko’s face announced that it was bitter.

  The little dancing girls came inside the curtain. Perhaps half sat down on stools by the door. The others crowded in front of them, one against another. They were all heavily made up and had on long-sleeved festive kimonos.

  Behind them, two or three young cherries were in full bloom. Defeated by the powerful colors of the girls’ kimonos, they seemed pale and wan. The sun was shining on the green of the tall trees beyond.

  ‘Water, Mother, water,’ said Satoko, glaring at the dancers.

  ‘There is no water. You can have some when we get home.’

  Suddenly Shingo too wanted water.

  One day in March, from the Yokosuka train, Shingo had seen a girl about Satoko’s age drinking at a fountain. She laughed in surprise when, as she turned it on, the water shot high in the air. The laughing face was very pretty. Her mother adjusted the fountain for her. Watching her drink as if it were the world’s most delicious water, Shingo thought to himself that this year too spring had come. The scene returned to him now.

  He wondered what it was about the cluster of little girls dressed for dancing that had made both him and Satoko want water. Satoko was grumbling again. ‘Buy me a kimono, Mother, buy me a kimono.’

  Fusako got up.

  Among the girls was a most appealing one a year or two older than Satoko. Her eyebrows were painted on in thick, short, sloping lines, and at the edges of her eyes, round as bells, there was rouge.

  Satoko stared at the girl as Fusako led her off, and as they started out through the curtain, lunged in her direction.

  ‘A kimono,’ she persisted. ‘A kimono.’

  ‘Grandfather said he’ll buy you one for Three-five-seven Day,’* said Fusako insinuatingly. ‘She hasn’t once worn a kimono. Only diapers from an old cotton kimono, an outcast of a kimono.’

  They went into a tea stall, and Shingo asked for water. Satoko gulped down two glasses.

  They had left the precincts of the Great Buddha and were walking toward home when a girl in a dancing kimono hurried past on her mother’s hand, apparently also on the way home. This would not do, thought Shingo, taking Satoko by the shoulder; but
he was too late.

  ‘A kimono,’ said Satoko, reaching for the girl’s sleeve.

  ‘Don’t!’ Pulling away, the girl tripped over her long sleeve and fell.

  Shingo gasped and brought his hands to his face.

  The child was being run over. Shingo heard only his own gasp, but it seemed that numbers of other people had cried out.

  The automobile screeched to a stop. Three or four ran forward from among the horrified outlookers.

  The girl jumped up. Clinging to her mother’s skirt, she began screaming as if set afire.

  ‘Good, good,’ someone said. ‘The brakes worked. An expensive car.’

  ‘If it had been a broken-down wreck you wouldn’t be alive.’

  Satoko was terrified. Her eyes were rolled back into her head as if she were having a convulsion.

  Was the girl hurt, had she torn her kimono, asked Fusako, apologizing profusely to the girl’s mother. The mother was looking absently into space.

  When the girl had finished screaming, her thick powder had run; but her eyes were shining, as if washed clean.

  Shingo had little to say the rest of the way home.

  They heard the baby wailing.

  Singing a lullaby, Kikuko came out to greet them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Fusako. ‘I have her crying. I’m a failure.’

  Perhaps led on by her sister, perhaps surrendering now that she was safe at home, Satoko too was wailing.

  Ignoring Satoko, Fusako pulled her kimono open and took the baby from Kikuko.

  ‘Just look, will you. I’m all in a cold sweat here in the hollow between.’

  Shingo glanced up at a framed inscription that purported to be a Ryokan:* ‘In the heavens, a high wind.’ He had bought it when Ryokans were still cheap, but it was a forgery all the same. A friend having pointed this fact out, he could see that it must be true.

  ‘We had a look at the Akiko stone,’ he said to Kikuko. ‘It’s in Akiko’s own hand, and it says “Sakyamuni”.’

  ‘It does, does it?’

  4

  After dinner Shingo went out alone to look through the new and used kimono shops.