The Sound of the Mountain

Shingo hears, alone one night early in the novel, what he takes to be the mountain itself groaning, a sound he's certain no one else could have heard and that never repeats. Kawabata refuses to let it become a recurring omen the plot pays off; its single, unrepeatable occurrence is the point, an intimation of mortality precise enough to notice and vague enough that Shingo can never confirm whether he imagined it, which is closer to how most people actually register the approach of old age than a tidier symbol would be.

Shingo's tenderness toward his daughter-in-law Kikuko carries an unmistakable erotic charge he never acts on and barely lets himself name, and Kawabata roots it in an old grief: Shingo loved Kikuko's aunt, his wife's more beautiful older sister, before circumstance gave him the plainer sister instead, and Kikuko's beauty reads to him as that old loss finally returned in a form he's forbidden from claiming. His own son Shuichi treats Kikuko with open cruelty and infidelity, which perversely makes Shingo her closest ally in the household, an old man's displaced devotion standing in for a husband's absent one.

Kawabata builds the novel's emotional pressure almost entirely out of small, exact naturalistic detail rather than incident: a cicada's shell forgotten on a branch, gingko leaves falling in a particular light, Shingo's own recorded dreams standing in for feelings the family never discusses aloud at the dinner table. The mono no aware register, a gentle, accumulating awareness of impermanence, does the work that a Western domestic novel would usually hand to confrontation and plot.

Shingo's dreams, recorded across the novel in careful, almost clinical detail, function as the household's only place where its real feelings get spoken. He dreams of dead friends, of women from his past, of his own children as they were before disappointment set in, and Kawabata treats these dream sequences as more emotionally candid than anything the family says to each other over breakfast. The technique lets Kawabata keep the novel's surface almost entirely composed while still giving the reader full access to a grief and longing the characters themselves would never admit to while awake.