Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain - He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery

Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month.  Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this year’s event.  Amazing.

The book is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain (1954, serialized 1949-54).  The sound of the mountain is a foreboding of death.  The novel is about an old man, Shingo, and his midlife crisis.  His friends are dying, his two adult children are running into marital difficulties, and he begins having vivid dreams.  The old man is in his early sixties, employed, healthy, sexually interested, if vaguely and politely so, in his daughter-in-law.  Not so old is what I am saying.

Life and events are the ordinary kind.  Melodrama is minimized.  The novel was serialized over five years, which fits the pace of the story perfectly, although I fear I would have had trouble remembering who was who.  Typical events of daily life are mixed with more symbolically meaningful material.

So Kawabata gives us, for example, a page of tedious chatter:

“No, please.”  He came out on the veranda.  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I was about to change his diaper.”

“Fusako?”

“She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.”  (170)

Etc., including weather small talk.  But then a pair of American military planes fly past. “They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope” (171) which leads to thoughts and talk of air raids and how children experienced the war, rather more poignant stuff, before returning to the trivia.  This is from a longer section titled “The Kite’s House,” which features the spring return of a kite to the house.  The same kite as previous years?  A descendant?  Is the kite returning to Shingo’s house, or does Shingo live in the kite’s house?  All of this, as is the entire novel, from Shingo’s point of view.

In a sense this is really a novel about how Shingo creates meaning from the world around him.

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 the bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.  (29)

Then on the next page he has one of his vivid dreams, this time about noodles.

Here are a couple of lines from different dreams.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.  (205)

From his body they took a great bucketful of mosquitoes.  (238)

The style of the novel is generally quite plain, plainer than Snow Country (1948), but the frequent dreams add a level of weirdness to the prose.

To my tastes, I would like more of that, and still find Kawabata’s early, fragmented, Modernist The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) his most interesting book.  But the dreams shake things up.

The Japanese context has its own interest, the occasional post-war intrusions, for example.  If the novel were about Shingo’s son it would be about the way the war and combat affected him, but the subject is kept at a distance.  The forthrightness about suicide always makes my eyes pop.  “’A man can always find another woman to commit suicide with him’” (245) – this is said matter-of-factly by Shingo’s sensible wife, about their son-in-law.

Maybe next year I will try to find a Japanese novel that is more formally or linguistically unusual.  I do not know what that might be.  Any recommendations are welcome. 

Thanks, Meredith!