The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  He had awakened from a dream before Shuichi’s voice had awakened him. At the time he remembered it well, but when he was awakened the second time he had almost forgotten it.

  Perhaps it was the pounding of his heart that had erased it.

  He remembered only the fact that a girl fourteen or fifteen years old had an abortion, and the words: ‘And she has become a holy child forever.’

  He had been reading a novel. Those were the concluding words.

  He had read the novel as words, and seen the plot as a movie or play. He had not appeared in it himself. He had been completely the onlooker.

  A girl who had an abortion at fourteen or fifteen and was at the same time a holy child was something of an oddity; but there had been a long story. Shingo’s dream had read a masterpiece about pure love between a boy and a girl. His feelings were still with him when he woke at the end of the reading.

  Had it been that the girl did not know she was pregnant and did not think of it as an abortion, and went on longing for the boy from whom she had been separated? But such a twist in the dream would be unnatural and unclean.

  A forgotten dream could not be put together again. And his feelings upon reading the novel were a dream.

  The girl must have had a name, and he must have seen her face, but only her size, or more properly her smallness, remained vaguely in his mind. She seemed to have been in Japanese dress.

  He asked himself whether it had been a vision of Yasuko’s beautiful sister, but decided that it could not have been.

  The source of the dream was no more than an article in last night’s paper.

  ‘Girl Has Twins. Misguided Awakening of Spring in Aomori.’ Under the large headline was this article: ‘According to a survey by the Aomori Prefectural Public Health Service of legal abortions under the Eugenics Law, five girls fifteen years old, three girls fourteen, and one girl thirteen have undergone abortions. There have been four hundred cases of abortion among girls of high-school age, sixteen to eighteen, and of these twenty per cent have been high-school students. There has been one middle-school pregnancy in Hirosaki and one in Aomori, and there have been four in South Tsugaru District and one in North Tsugaru District. Though the girls have gone to specialists, a lack of sexual knowledge has produced the horrifying results of death in 0.2 per cent of the cases and serious illness in 2.5 per cent. The thought that others, in secret, go to their deaths at the hands of unlicensed doctors makes one tremble for “young mothers”.

  Four actual cases were listed. A second-year middle-school student, fourteen years old, in North Tsugaru District, had, in February of the year before, suddenly felt the coming on of birth pangs, and borne twins. Mother and children were healthy, and the girl was back in school, now a third-year student. Her parents had not known of her pregnancy.

  A high-school student in Aomori, having promised herself to a classmate, became pregnant the summer before. The parents of the two, on the grounds that they were still in school, decided upon an abortion. But the boy said: ‘We weren’t playing. We’re going to get married soon.’

  The article had been a shock to Shingo; and so he had gone to bed and dreamed of an abortion.

  But his dream had seen nothing ugly in the boy and girl. It had told a story of pure love, and made the girl ‘a holy child’. He had not so viewed the matter before going to sleep.

  The shock had become something beautiful. Why should there have been such a transformation?

  Perhaps, in the dream, he had rescued the girl, and himself, too.

  In any case, benevolence had emerged from the dream.

  Shingo reflected upon himself, wondering whether for him benevolence woke in dreams.

  And he became somewhat sentimental. Had a flicker of youth given him a dream of pure love in old age?

  The sentimentality had remained after the dream, and perhaps made him greet Shuichi’s voice, like a loud moaning, with benevolence, made him feel in it love and sadness.

  3

  Still in bed, Shingo heard Kikuko arousing Shuichi.

  He woke too early these days. Yasuko, a late sleeper, had reprimanded him. ‘Old people aren’t popular when they make fools of themselves and get up too early.’

  He too thought it improper to be up before Kikuko, and so he would go quietly to the front door for the paper and read it in bed.

  Shuichi seemed to have gone to wash.

  There was a sound of vomiting. He had evidently gagged while brushing his teeth.

  Kikuko ran to the kitchen.

  Shingo got up. On the veranda he met Kikuko coming back from the kitchen.

  ‘Father!’

  She stopped, almost running into him, and flushed. Something spilled from the cup in her hand. It seemed to be a cold sake, a remedy for Shuichi’s hangover.

  Shingo thought her very beautiful, a flush on the somewhat pale face, without cosmetics, shyness in the still sleepy eyes, the beautiful teeth showing between plain, unpainted lips upon which floated a smile of embarrassment.

  Was there still this childlike quality in her? Shingo thought of his dream.

  But it was not so very strange that girls no older than those in the article should marry and bear children. In ancient times that had been the ordinary thing.

  And when he was no older than the boys, Shingo himself had been strongly drawn to Yasuko’s sister.

  Seeing that he had come into the breakfast room, Kikuko opened the shutters in some haste.

  Spring sunlight flooded in.

  Kikuko seemed startled by the brightness. Shingo was watching her from behind. She brought both hands to her head and pulled at her hair, still tangled from sleep.

  The great gingko in the shrine precincts was not yet sending out new shoots. Yet somehow, in the morning light and the morning nostrils, there was something akin to a scent of buds.

  Quickly putting herself in order, Kikuko brought him gyokuro.

  ‘Here you are, Father. I’m being very slow this morning.’

  Always when he got up in the morning, Shingo had gyokuro in very hot water. The hotter the water the more difficult the steeping, and Kikuko did it best.

  Shingo wondered whether gyokuro might not be even better if it came from an unmarried girl.

  ‘You’re very busy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Sake for the drunkard, gyokuro for the dotard.’

  ‘You knew about it?’

  ‘He woke me up. At first I thought it was Teru.’

  ‘You did?’ Kikuko sat with bowed head, as if unable to move.

  ‘I was awake before you were, Kikuko,’ said Fusako, in the next room. ‘It wasn’t at all pleasant. I knew it was Shuichi, because Teru is a quieter sort.’

  Still in her nightgrown, her younger child at her breast, Fusako came into the breakfast room. Her features were bad, but her breasts were white and remarkably full.

  ‘You’re a mess,’ said Shingo. ‘Put something on.’

  ‘Aihara was a mess, and so naturally I’m a mess too. There’s nothing else for you to be when you’re married to a man who’s a mess.’ Fusako shifted Kuniko from her right breast to her left. ‘If you didn’t want it that way, then it would have been a very good idea for you to look into things before you married me off.’

  ‘Men and women are different.’

  ‘They are the same. Look at Shuichi.’

  She started for the washstand.

  Kikuko reached for Kuniko. Fusako handed her over so roughly that she began to cry.

  Unconcerned, Fusako walked off.

  Yasuko, back from washing her face, took the child. ‘What do you suppose her father means to do? It was New Year’s Eve when Fusako came back. More than two months ago. He says that Fusako is a mess, but I think that Father here is even messier in the matter that is most important. You said on New Year’s Eve that it was good to have a clean break, and since then you’ve done exactly nothing. And there’s not been a word from Aihara.’ She was looking down at the baby as she spoke. ‘The Tanizaki girl
you had in your office – Shuichi says she’s half a widow. I suppose Fusako is half a divorcee.’

  ‘What does “half a widow” mean?’

  ‘She wasn’t married, but the man she was in love with was killed in the war.’

  ‘But Tanizaki would have been a mere child.’

  ‘She was sixteen or seventeen by the old count. Old enough to have a man you can’t forget.’

  Shingo thought the expression ‘a man you can’t forget’ an odd one to come from Yasuko.

  Shuichi left without breakfast. He was late, and probably not feeling well.

  Shingo killed time until the morning mail came. Among the letters Kikuko brought was one addressed to her.

  He handed it to her.

  She had apparently brought them in without looking at them. She rarely got letters. Nor did it seem that she expected them.

  She read the letter in the breakfast room.

  ‘It’s from a friend. She had an abortion and hasn’t been well since. She’s in the University Hospital in Hongo.’

  ‘Oh?’ He took off his glasses and looked into her face. ‘Did she fall into the clutches of some unlicensed old midwife? Very dangerous.’

  The newspaper article last night and Kikuko’s letter – Shingo was struck by the coincidence. And he had dreamed of an abortion.

  He was tempted to tell Kikuko of the dream.

  But, as he gazed at her, unable to speak, he felt in himself a flicker of something youthful, and was startled as another thought flashed across his mind, that Kikuko was pregnant and was thinking of an abortion.

  4

  ‘See how the plums are blooming,’ said Kikuko wonderingly as the train passed through the North Kamakura valley.

  In North Kamakura there were large numbers of plums very near the train window. Shingo saw them every day but paid no particular attention to them.

  The white blossoms were past their prime. In the warm sunlight, they were beginning to look dirty.

  ‘But our plums are in bloom too,’ said Shingo. There were only two or three of them, however, and perhaps this was the first real display that Kikuko had seen.

  It was rare for her to get letters, and it was rare for her to go out, save to shop in Kamakura.

  On her way to pay a sick call on her friend in the University Hospital, she had left with Shingo.

  The house of Shuichi’s woman was near the University. That fact troubled Shingo.

  He wanted, along the way, to ask whether Kikuko was pregnant.

  The question was not such a difficult one, and yet it seemed quite possible that he would let the opportunity pass.

  How many years had it been since he had stopped asking 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?

  Shingo had forgotten a matter of which Yasuko had stopped speaking.

  As he thought to ask Kikuko the question, Yasuko came into his mind.

  Perhaps if Yasuko had known that Kikuko was going to an obstetric ward, she would have suggested an examination.

  Yasuko sometimes spoke to Kikuko of children. To Shingo it seemed that Kikuko found the subject forbidding.

  Kikuko had without doubt said something to Shuichi. Long ago Shingo had listened with admiration to a friend’s theory that for a woman the man to whom she made the revelation was everything. If she had another man, she kept the secret of her condition to herself.

  A daughter did not make it to her own father.

  Shingo seemed to avoid talking to Kikuko of Shuichi’s woman, and she to him.

  If she was pregnant, it might be because of a ripening brought on by Shuichi’s woman. An unpleasant thought, but a part of being human; and it seemed to him that there was cruelty hidden in speaking to Kikuko of children.

  ‘Did Mother tell you that Grandfather Amamiya came around yesterday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He came to say that he was being taken into the Tokyo house. And he brought two big sacks of cookies and asked us to be good to Teru.’

  ‘Are the cookies for Teru?’

  ‘Mother thinks so. Or maybe one is for us. Grandfather Amamiya was very happy. He said that young Mr Amamiya’s business was doing well, and that he had built on to the house.’

  ‘That’s how it is. A good businessman sells his house right away and starts all over again, and before you know it he is building on to a new house. With people like me, ten years go by like a day. Even this train ride gets to seem like too much trouble. The other day we had dinner together, all of us old men. It’s remarkable how we go on year after year, doing the same old things. We get tired and bored, and ask when they’ll come for us.’

  It did not seem that Kikuko quite understood the last remark.

  ‘Someone said that when we go before the judge we should tell him that spare parts commit no sins. That’s what we are, life’s spare parts. And while we’re alive, shouldn’t life at least be kind to us?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It’s true. I doubt whether anyone in any age can say he has really lived life for everything in it. Think of the man who checks your shoes at the restaurant. All he does day after day is put away shoes and take out shoes. One of us old men had a theory all his own – that things are actually easier for that kind of spare part. But the waitress didn’t agree. The old man who takes care of shoes has a hard life, she said. He has to work in a hole with shoe shelves all around him, and there he sits hugging a charcoal fire and shining shoes. It’s cold in the winter there in the doorway and hot in the summer. You’ve noticed how our own granny likes to talk about old people’s homes?’

  ‘Mother? But with Mother it’s not that serious. It’s like young people who keep saying they wish they were dead.’

  ‘That’s true, I suppose. She assumes she’s going to outlive me. But what young people are you talking about?’

  ‘Young people …’ Kikuko hesitated. ‘In my friend’s letter.’

  ‘The letter this morning?’

  ‘Yes. She’s not married.’

  ‘Well!’

  He fell silent. Kikuko could not go on.

  It was as the train left Totsuka. Hodogaya, the next stop, was some distance away.

  ‘Kikuko. I’ve been thinking. Wouldn’t you and Shuichi like to live away from us?’

  Kikuko looked at him, waiting for him to say more. Then, a pleading note in her voice: ‘Why, Father? Because Fusako has come back?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with Fusako. I know it’s hard for you, having a half-divorcee with us; but even if she divorces Aihara, she probably won’t be with us long. No, it has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the two of you. Don’t you think it would be better?’

  ‘No. You are good to me, and I would rather be with you. I don’t think you can imagine how lonely I’d be away from you.’

  ‘You’re being very kind.’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m taking advantage of you. I’m the baby, the spoiled child of the family. I was always my father’s favorite and I like being with you.’

  ‘I can understand why your father favored you, and it’s good having you with us. I wouldn’t be happy to see you go. But Shuichi is the way he is, and I haven’t once talked the problem over with you. A useless sort of parent to be living with. If the two of you were by yourselves, mightn’t you come up with your own solution?’

  ‘No. You don’t say anything, but I know that you’re worrying about me and sympathizing with me. That’s how I manage to go on.’ There were tears in the large eyes. ‘I think I’d be afraid if you made us live away. I don’t think I could stand to wait at home alone. I’d be too lonely, and frightened.’

  ‘I see – waiting for him by yourself. But this isn’t the sort of thing to talk about on a train. Think it over.’

  She did seem to be frightened. Her shoulders were trembling.

  He saw her to Hongo in a taxi.

  Perhaps because she had been pamper
ed by her father, or perhaps because she was upset, she did not seem to think the service unnatural.

  It was most unlikely that Shuichi’s woman would be out walking, and yet he was concerned. He waited until Kikuko was safely inside the hospital.

  The Bell in Spring

  1

  In Kamakura in the season of cherry blossoms, the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Buddhist capital was being celebrated. The temple bell rang all through the day.

  There were times when Shingo could not hear it. Kikuko heard it, apparently, even when she was working or talking; but Shingo had to listen carefully.

  ‘There,’ Kikuko would inform him. ‘There. It rang again.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Shingo, cocking his head to one side. ‘And how is it with Granny?’

  Yasuko was no comfort. ‘Of course I can hear it. It’s practically deafening.’

  She was reading at her own pace through the five days’ accumulation of newspapers before her.

  ‘There it goes, there it goes,’ said Shingo. Once he had caught the sound, it was easy to follow succeeding strokes.

  ‘You seem very pleased.’ Yasuko took off her glasses and looked at him. ‘The priests must get tired, ringing away at it day after day.’

  ‘No, they have the pilgrims ring, at ten yen a stroke,’ explained Kikuko. ‘It’s not the priests.’

  ‘A clever idea,’ said Shingo.

  ‘They call it the bell for the dead, or something of the sort. The angle is to have a hundred thousand people or a million people or something of the sort ring the bell.’

  ‘The angle?’ Her choice of words struck Shingo as amusing.

  ‘It has a dark sound to it.’ said Kikuko. ‘I don’t really like it.’

  ‘You think it’s dark?’

  Shingo himself had been thinking how pleasantly quiet and relaxed it was, sitting in the breakfast room on an April Sunday, looking at the cherry blossoms and listening to the bell.

  ‘What is this the seven-hundredth anniversary of, anyway?’ asked Yasuko. ‘Some say it has to do with the Great Buddha, and some say it’s Nichiren.’