Name: The Sound of the Mountain
Rating: 3.590909090909091 (11 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679762645

Yasunari Kawabata

The Sound of the Mountain

Viet-Hung Nguyen

How many years had it been since he had stopped sking Yasuko about her physiological processes? Since the change of life, Yasuko herself had said nothing. Had it become a question not of vigor but of decay?

"A dream. And the national monument was a dream too. Don't put faith in what dreams decide for you." He wiped his face with the palm of his hand.

a heartfelt psychological study of the dynamics of a multigenerational family, seen through the eyes of an aging patriarch who feels the burden of responsibility for his children, and tries unsuccessfully to fix their problems as he slowly realises the time he has left.

kawabata’s writing is so very dreamy and lyrical. i like the metaphors here of nature alluding to certain human emotions felt in these scenes. very slow but very meditative. this book is a cluster of allusions beautifully presented in haiku tones that made me feel a lot of lonesomeness and silent communications to family tropes and the desire to fix your family’s flaws as a way of resolving the problems you put on them in the past. a lot of quiet observations and silent ways of loving here that is expressed so tenderly, beautiful read.

a heartfelt psychological study of the dynamics of a multigenerational family, seen through the eyes of an aging patriarch who feels the burden of responsibility for his children, and tries unsuccessfully to fix their problems as he slowly realises the time he has left.

kawabata’s writing is so very dreamy and lyrical. i like the metaphors here of nature alluding to certain human emotions felt in these scenes. very slow but very meditative. this book is a cluster of allusions beautifully presented in haiku tones that made me feel a lot of lonesomeness and silent communications to family tropes and the desire to fix your family’s flaws as a way of resolving the problems you put on them in the past. a lot of quiet observations and silent ways of loving here that is expressed so tenderly, beautiful read.

Gabriela Roxana 

1.5

Quite terrible. But I had read worse.

Jake Vermillion

Ainsley Jeffery

Anas A

Ofelia

Alexandra Sergeychik

Florian

Laura Luchian

Louis Currie

“The apparently fixed constellations of family relationships, the recurrent beauties of nature, the flaming or flickering patterns of love and lust—all the elements of Kawabata’s fictional world are combined in an engrossing novel that rises to the incantatory fascination of a N­ō drama.” —Saturday Review Few novels have rendered the predicament of old age more beautifully than The Sound of the Mountain. For in his portrait of an elderly Tokyo businessman, Yasunari Kawabata charts the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing. By day Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundation of Shingo’s life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and uneasy stirrings of sexual desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments—and the tiny shifts of loyalty and affection that threaten to sever it irreparably—Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker

The Sound of the Mountain

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