The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  His hands were against drooping, vaguely pointed breasts. They remained soft, refusing to rise. The woman was refusing to respond. All very stupid.

  Even though he was touching her breasts, he did not know who the woman was. It was not so much that he did not know as that he did not seek to find out. She had no face and no body; just two breasts floating in space. Asking for the first time who she was, he saw that she had become the younger sister of a friend of Shuichi’s; but the recognition brought neither excitement nor feelings of guilt. The impression that it was the sister was a fleeting one. She remained a dim figure. Her breasts were those of a woman who had not had children, but Shingo did not think she was a virgin. He was startled to find traces of her purity on his finger. He felt disconcerted, but not especially guilty.

  ‘We can say that she was an athlete,’ he muttered. Startled at the remark, he awoke.

  ‘All very stupid’ – he recognized Mori Ogai’s* dying words. It seemed he had once read them in a newspaper.

  But it had probably been an evasion on his part, waking from an unpleasant dream, to think first of Mori Ogai’s dying words and then to tie them to the dream.

  The Shingo of the dream had felt neither delight nor affection, nor even wantonness. All very stupid indeed. And a dreary way to wake up.

  He had not sought to assault the girl. Perhaps he had been about to. Had he assaulted her, trembling with love or terror, the dream would have had more life after he waked.

  He thought of wanton dreams he had had in recent years. They had generally been of women he would have to call coarse and vulgar. So it had been tonight. Was it that even in a dream he feared adultery?

  He remembered the friend’s sister as having full breasts. Before Shuichi married there had been some not-very-serious talk of arranging a marriage with her, and the two had kept company.

  A bolt flashed across his mind.

  Had not the girl in the dream been an incarnation of Kikuko, a substitute for her? Had not moral considerations after all had their way even in his dream, had he not borrowed the figure of the girl as a substitute for Kikuko? And, to coat over the unpleasantness, to obscure the guilt, had he not made her a less attractive girl than she was?

  And might it not be that, if his desires were given free rein, if he could remake his life as he wished, he would want to love the virgin Kikuko, before she was married to Shuichi?

  Suppressed and twisted, the subconscious wish had taken an unlovable form in his dream. Even in the dream, had he sought to hide it, to deceive himself?

  That he had transferred it to the girl who had been talked of for Shuichi, that he had given her an elusive, uncertain form – was it not because he feared in the extreme having the woman be Kikuko?

  And the fact that, upon awakening, he had difficulty remembering it, that his companion in the dream, and the plot as well, was blurred, and the fact that there had been no pleasure in the hand against the breast – might these be because, at the moment of awakening, a certain cunning went adroitly to work at erasing the dream?

  ‘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.

  The dream had had a chilling effect, but when he woke Shingo was bathed in a disagreeable sweat.

  The rain which after the dream of whiskers had been only enough to tell him that it was rain was now driven by a wind, and beating against the house. The dampness seemed to come up through the floor mats. It had the sound of a rain, however, that would have its brief rampage and go.

  He remembered an ink wash by Watanabe Kazan* that he had seen at a friend’s house a few days before.

  It had been of a single crow at the tip of a leafless tree, and had born the legend: ‘A stubborn crow in the dawn: the rains of June. Kazan.’

  Shingo thought he understood Kazan’s feelings, and the intent of the picture. The crow, high in a naked tree, bearing up under strong wind and rain, was awaiting the dawn. The storm was shown in faint ink. He did not remember the tree very well, but he thought it had been broken off, leaving only a thick trunk. He remembered the crow vividly. Perhaps from sleep, perhaps from the wind – most likely both – its feathers were somewhat ruffled. It had a heavy bill. The upper bill, blackly stained where the ink had run, was thicker and heavier than the lower. The eyes were sleepy, as if it had not yet fully awakened. Yet they were strong, and somehow angry. It was a large figure for the size of the picture.

  Shingo knew of Kazan only that he had been impoverished and that he had committed suicide, but he could see that this ‘Crow in the Stormy Dawn’ gave expression to Kazan’s feelings at a certain point in his life.

  No doubt the friend had put the painting up to match the season.

  Shingo ventured an opinion: ‘A very strong-minded bird. Not at all likeable.’

  ‘Oh? I used to look at it during the war. Damned crow, I used to think. Damned crow it is. But it has a quietness about it. If Kazan had to kill himself for no better reasons than he had, then you and I probably ought to kill ourselves time after time. It’s a question of the age you live in.’

  ‘We waited for the dawn, too.’

  The crow would be hanging in the friend’s parlor this rainy night, thought Shingo.

  He wondered where his own kite and crow would be.

  4

  Unable to sleep after waking from the second dream, Shingo lay waiting for the dawn. He did not wait with the stubborn resistance of the Kazan crow, however.

  Whether the woman in the dream had been Kikuko or the friend’s sister, he thought it altogether too dreary that no flicker of lust had come over him.

  The dream had been uglier than any waking adultery. The ugliness of old age, might it be?

  Women had left his life during the war, and had been absent since. He was not very old, but that was how it was with him. What had been killed by the war had not come to life again. It seemed too that his way of thinking was as the war had left it, pushed into a narrow kind of common sense.

  He wanted to inquire among his friends whether many old men his age felt as he did. But perhaps he would but be laughed at and called weak and feckless.

  What was wrong with loving Kikuko in a dream? What was there to fear, to be ashamed of, in a dream? And indeed what would be wrong with secretly loving her in his waking hours? He tried this new way of thinking.

  But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: ‘I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.’ The gloom only grew denser.

  Shuichi’s marital relations had ripened since he had taken a mistress. Since Kikuko had had her abortion, they had softened, warmed. On the night of that wild storm, Kikuko had been much more coquettish toward Shuichi than usual: on the night he had come home drunk, she had forgiven him more gently than usual.

  Was she sad, or silly?

  And was she aware of these facts herself? Perhaps, not alive to them, she was but giving herself in all innocence to the wonders of creation, riding the wave of life.

  She had protested by not having the baby and by going back to her family, and so given expression to an unbearable loneliness; and then, returning a few days later, she had drawn closer to Shuichi, as if apologizing for some misdeed, or treating a wound.

  Shingo could, if he chose, think that this too was ‘all very stupid’. But probably it was to the good.

  He was even able to think that he might as well wait for the Kinu affair to settle itself.

  Shuichi was his son; but were they so ideal a couple, were they so fated for each other, that Kikuko must put up with such treatment? Once he began doubting, the doubts were endless.

  Not wanting to arouse Yasuko, he could not turn on the light to look at his watch; but dawn seemed to be breaking, and it would soon be time for the temple bell.

  He remembered the bell at the Shinjuku Garden.

  It had signaled closing time, but he had said to Kikuko: ‘It sounds like a church bell.’
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  He had felt as if he were making his way through some wooded park on his way to a Western church, and as if the cluster of people at the gate were also going to church.

  He got up without having had enough sleep.

  He left early with Shuichi. He did not want to have to face Kikuko.

  Suddenly he asked: ‘Did you kill anyone during the war?’

  ‘I wonder. If anyone got in the way of a bullet from my machine gun, he probably died. But you might say I wasn’t shooting the machine gun.’

  Shuichi looked away in displeasure.

  The rain stopped during the day and began again in the evening. Tokyo was wrapped in a heavy fog.

  When he left the restaurant after a business dinner, he found himself in the predicament of having to see the geisha home in the last automobile.

  Two elderly geisha and Shingo were side by side, and three young ones sat on their knees.

  ‘Please.’ Shingo put his hand to the front of the girl’s obi.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, then.’ Reassured, she settled in his lap. She was four or five years younger than Kikuko.

  He meant to write her name down in his memorandum book once he was on the train. It was only a passing thought, however, which he seemed likely to forget.

  In the Rain

  1

  Kikuko was the first to read the newspaper that morning.

  Rain had apparently blown into the mailbox. She dried the paper over the gas as she was cooking breakfast.

  Sometimes, when he was awake early, Shingo went for the newspaper and took it back to bed with him; but now going for it seemed to have become Kikuko’s work.

  Usually he saw the newspaper only after Shuichi had left for the office.

  ‘Father, Father,’ Kikuko called softly through the door.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If you’re awake, would you come out for a minute?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Alarmed by the tone of her voice, he got up immediately.

  She was standing on the veranda with the newspaper in her hand.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Mr Aihara is in the paper.’

  ‘Has Aihara been taken in by the police?’

  ‘No.’ Retreating a step, she handed him the paper.

  ‘It’s still wet.’

  He reached for it, reluctantly. It sagged limply from his hand. Kikuko held it up for him.

  ‘I can’t see. What happened to Aihara?’

  ‘It was suicide with a woman.’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘He will probably be saved, it says.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He started off, leaving the newspaper with Kikuko. ‘I suppose Fusako is here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was scarcely likely that Fusako, who had gone to bed here with her two children late the night before, had committed suicide with Aihara, or that she would be in the paper.

  Looking at the wind-driven rain outside the toilet window, Shingo sought to calm himself. The drops fell in rapid succession from the long leaves of pampas grass at the foot of the mountain.

  ‘It’s a real downpour. Not the usual thing for June.’

  In the breakfast room, he took up the newspaper, but before he could begin reading his glasses slipped down over his nose. Snorting in annoyance, he took them off and rubbed impatiently at the bridge of his nose. It was damply unpleasant.

  His glasses slipped down again as he was reading the short article.

  The incident had occurred at Rendaiji Spa on the Izu Peninsula. The woman was dead. She was twenty-five or -six and had the look of a maid or waitress, but had not been identified. The man seemed to be a drug addict. The probability was that he would be saved. Because of his addiction and because there was no suicide note, there was a suspicion that he had himself been playing a game and had lured the woman on.

  Shingo clutched at his glasses, which had slipped to the tip of his nose, as if to give them a cuffing. He did not know whether he was angry that Aihara had tried suicide or angry that his glasses slipped.

  Rubbing at his face, he went off to the washstand.

  The newspaper said that Aihara had given the inn a Yokohama address. Fusako was not mentioned.

  The article was thus unrelated to Shingo’s family.

  Perhaps the registration was false, and Aihara was in fact a vagrant. And perhaps Fusako was no longer his wife.

  He washed his face before he brushed his teeth.

  Was it only sentimentality that left him troubled and confused at the thought that Fusako might still be Aihara’s wife?

  ‘Is this what they call letting time take care of things?’ he muttered to himself.

  Had time finally brought the solution he had so put off seeking?

  But might it not be that Shingo had had no recourse other than to hope for desperate action on Aihara’s part?

  He did not know whether Fusako had pushed Aihara to destruction, or whether Aihara had led her into misery. There were no doubt those whose nature it was to push their partners into misery and destruction, and those whose it was to be led into misery and destruction.

  ‘Kikuko,’ he said, going back into the breakfast room and sipping at hot tea. ‘You knew, didn’t you, that Aihara mailed us a divorce notice five or six days ago?’

  ‘Yes. You were furious.’

  ‘That I was. And Fusako said there was a limit to the insults a person could take. But maybe he was getting ready for suicide. He wasn’t pretending, he meant to kill himself. I imagine he just took the woman along for company.’

  Kikuko wrinkled her beautiful eyebrows and did not answer. She had on a striped silk kimono.

  ‘Would you get Shuichi up, please?’

  The retreating figure seemed taller than usual, perhaps because of the broad vertical stripes.

  ‘So Aihara did it?’ Shuichi took up the newspaper. ‘Has Fusako sent in the notice?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet?’ Shuichi looked up. ‘Why not? Send it in this morning. We won’t want to be sending in a divorce notice from a corpse.’

  ‘But what about the children? Aihara said nothing about them, and they’re too young to decide for themselves which family they want to be in.’

  The divorce notice, with Fusako’s seal on it, had been going to and from the office in Shingo’s briefcase.

  He had occasionally sent money to Aihara’s mother. He had thought to have the same messenger take the divorce notice to the ward office, but he had delayed from day to day.

  ‘They’re here, and you can’t do a damned thing about it. I imagine the police will be coming.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Looking for someone to hand Aihara over to.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think that must have been exactly why he sent the notice.’

  Banging the door open, Fusako came in, still in her night kimono.

  She ripped the newspaper to pieces and flung it away after only glancing at it. Though she had put more than enough strength into the ripping, it did not rebound when she threw it. Falling to the floor on her knees, she pushed violently at the fragments.

  ‘Close the door, please, Fusako,’ said Shingo.

  He could see the sleeping children through the open door.

  Her hands trembling, Fusako tore the newspaper into smaller pieces.

  Shuichi and Kikuko were silent.

  ‘Fusako. Do you feel like going for Aihara?’

  ‘No!’ Raising herself on an elbow, she turned and glared at Shingo, her eyes rolled upwards. ‘How do you feel about your daughter, Father? You coward. Seeing your own daughter into this, and not upset, not the least little bit. Swallow your pride and go for him yourself. You be the one to do it. Who was it that married me to a man like that?’

  Kikuko went off to the kitchen.

  Shingo had only said what floated into his mind; but he continued to think that if Fusako went for Aihara in this extremity, the two might come t
ogether again, they might make a new start. Human beings were capable of such things.

  2

  There was nothing more in the newspaper to tell them whether Aihara was dead or alive.

  Since the ward office had accepted the divorce notice, it would seem that he was not registered as dead.

  Or if he was dead, had his identity not been established? It hardly seemed likely. There was his lame mother. Even if she had not seen the newspaper, someone among their acquaintances and relatives would surely have noticed. Shingo concluded that Aihara had been saved.

  But, having taken in Aihara’s two children, was it enough for him just to conclude? For Shuichi the answer was clear, but Shingo himself still had doubts.

  The two children were now Shingo’s responsibility. Shuichi apparently did not consider the fact that they might one day be his.

  Quite aside from the worry of rearing and educating the children, it would seem that what chance Fusako and the children had had for happiness had been cut in half; and was that fact too a part of Shingo’s responsibility?

  As he sent off the divorce notice, Shingo thought of the woman with Aihara.

  A woman had died, that much was certain. What were the life and death of a woman?

  ‘Come back and haunt us,’ he muttered to himself. Startled, he added: ‘And what a stupid life you had.’

  If Aihara and Fusako had gone on living together as an ordinary husband and wife, the woman need not have died; and so it was not impossible to call Shingo himself a murderer by remote control. Should there not then come into his mind pious thoughts about the dead woman?

  But there was no way of conjuring up her image. Suddenly he saw Kikuko’s baby. He could not of course see the face of a baby disposed of so early in pregnancy. Still he pictured the varieties of beauty in children.

  The baby had not been born; and was he not then twice a distant murderer?

  Unpleasantly wet days went on, when even his glasses seemed damp and clammy. He felt a heaviness in his right chest.