The Sound of the Mountain

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Startled, he opened his eyes. Might he be having a hemorrhage?

  Kikuko was holding her breath, and her eyes were on Yasuko’s hands.

  It was an avalanche he had seen in the mountain home of his boyhood.

  ‘Will this do?’

  Yasuko was putting the last touches on the knot.

  ‘Yes.’

  His fingers brushed against hers as he reached to feel it.

  He remembered that when he had left college and first discarded his choke-collared student’s uniform for an ordinary business suit, it had been Yasuko’s beautiful sister who had tied his tie for him.

  Shingo turned to the mirror on the wardrobe, avoiding the eyes of Kikuko and Yasuko.

  ‘This should do nicely. Well, old age has finally caught up with me. It’s not a very comfortable feeling when you find all of a sudden that you can’t tie your own tie.’

  To judge from the facility with which she had tied it for him, Yasuko would appear to have performed the function in the early days of their marriage, but he could not remember when it might have been.

  Or perhaps, when she had gone to help after the death of her sister, she had tied her handsome brother-in-law’s tie.

  Slipping into sandals, a worried Kikuko saw him to the gate.

  ‘What are your plans for this evening?’

  ‘Nothing scheduled. I’ll be home early.’

  ‘Make it very early.’

  Gazing at Mount Fuji in the autumn blue as the train passed Ofuna, Shingo again felt his tie. He found that left and right were reversed. Facing him, Yasuko had made the left end the longer.

  He untied it and retied it with no effort.

  That he should earlier have forgotten the process seemed scarcely credible.

  2

  It was not uncommon now for Shingo and Shuichi to take the same train home.

  Normally there were trains on the Yokosuka Line every half-hour, but during rush hours the number was increased to one every fifteen minutes. Sometimes rush-hour trains were emptier than normal ones.

  At Tokyo Station a young girl occupied one of the seats opposite them.

  ‘Would you save this for me, please?’ she said to Shuichi, putting a red suede handbag on the seat.

  ‘Both seats?’

  She murmured an answer that was not entirely clear. As she turned and went out, however, there was no suggestion of embarrassment on her somewhat heavily powdered face. The narrow shoulders of her coat had a most winsome upthrust, and the coat flowed down over a gently elegant figure.

  Shingo was puzzled. How had Shuichi guessed that the girl wanted both seats saved? He seemed to have an instinct for such things; but how had he known that the girl would be waiting for someone?

  Now that his son had taken the lead, however, Shingo too thought it most evident that the girl had gone to look for her companion.

  And why, since she had been sitting by the window, opposite Shingo, was it Shuichi to whom she had spoken? Probably because, as she had stood up, she had found herself facing him; and then again, perhaps Shuichi was for a woman the more approachable of the two.

  Shingo looked at his son’s profile.

  Shuichi was reading the evening paper.

  The girl got back onto the train. Clutching the frame of the open door, she looked up and down the platform. Apparently the person with whom she had an appointment had not come. Her light-colored coat, as she returned to her seat, flowed rhythmically from shoulder to hem. It was held together by a large button at the throat. The pockets were well down and forward. She swayed from side to side, one hand in a pocket, as she came down the aisle to her seat. The cut, though somewhat strange, was most becoming.

  Sitting down opposite Shuichi this time, she looked repeatedly at the door. It would appear that she had chosen the aisle seat because it offered the better view.

  Her handbag still lay on the seat opposite Shingo. It was a sort of flattened cylinder, and had a large clasp.

  The diamond earrings were no doubt imitation, but they had a good luster. The wide nose stood out on the firm, regular face, and the mouth was small and well shaped. The thick eyebrows, with a tendency to sweep upwards, had been clipped short. The line of the wide eyes was equally graceful, but disappeared before it reached the corners. The jaw was firm and strong. These various features added up to a face that was in its way beautiful.

  There was a certain weariness in the eyes, and Shingo had trouble guessing her age.

  The doorway was suddenly crowded. Shingo’s eyes and the girl’s were on it. Five or six men, apparently on their way home from an excursion, came aboard with large maple branches in their arms.

  The dark red of the leaves suggested cold mountain country.

  Presently he learned, from the boisterous talk, that the men had been deep in the mountains of Echigo.

  ‘The maples in Shinshu will be their best,’ he said to Shuichi.

  He was thinking less, however, of the wild maples in the mountains of his old home than of the large potted maple, its leaves crimson, among the memorial tablets when Yasuko’s sister had died.

  Shuichi, of course, had not been born.

  He gazed at the red leaves, speaking so vividly of the season.

  He came to himself. The father of the girl was seated before him.

  So she had been waiting for her father! The thought somehow brought relief to Shingo.

  The father had the same wide nose, so similar indeed that the effect was almost comical. The hairlines were identical. The father wore dark-rimmed glasses.

  Like strangers, father and daughter neither spoke to nor looked at each other. The father was asleep before they had left the outskirts of Tokyo. The daughter also closed her eyes; and even the eyelashes seemed identical.

  Shuichi did not resemble Shingo as closely.

  Although waiting for the two to exchange even a remark, Shingo felt somehow envious of this complete indifference.

  Theirs was no doubt a peaceful family.

  He was therefore startled when, in Yokohama, the girl got off by herself. They had in fact not been father and daughter but complete strangers!

  He felt that he had been deceived.

  The man opened his eyes slightly as they stopped in Yokohama, and went untidily back to sleep.

  Now that the girl had gone the middle-aged man before him seemed untidy to Shingo.

  3

  Shingo nudged Shuichi with his elbow. ‘So they weren’t father and daughter.’

  Shuichi did not give as much evidence of interest as Shingo had hoped for.

  ‘You saw them, didn’t you?’

  Shuichi nodded perfunctorily.

  ‘Very strange.’

  Shuichi did not seem to think the matter strange at all.

  ‘They did look alike.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they did.’

  The man was asleep, and the train would have drowned out Shingo’s voice; but still it did not seem right to be loudly assessing the man right before one’s eyes.

  Shingo looked away, feeling guilty even at staring; and as he did so a sadness came over him.

  It was at first sadness for the man, and then it came to be directed at Shingo himself.

  The train was on the long run between Hodogaya and Totsuka. The autumn sky was darkening.

  The man was younger than Shingo, but in his late fifties even so. And the girl – would she perhaps be the age of Kikuko? There had been in her nothing corresponding to the cleanness of Kikuko’s eyes.

  But how could it be, Shingo wondered, that she was not the man’s child?

  The more he thought about the problem the more his wonder grew.

  There were in the world people so resembling each other that one could only take them for parent and child. There could hardly, however, be large numbers of such people. Probably in all the world there was only the one man to go with the girl, only the one girl to go with the man. Only the one for either of them; and indeed perhaps in all the world th
ere was only one such couple. They lived as strangers, with no suggestion of a bond between them. Perhaps they were even ignorant of each other’s existence.

  And quite by chance they were aboard the same train. They had come together for the first time, and probably would never meet again. Thirty minutes, in the length of a human life. They had parted without exchanging words. Sitting side by side, they had not looked at each other, and neither could have noticed the resemblance. And they had separated, participants in a miracle of which they had been unaware.

  And the only one struck by the strangeness of it all was an outsider.

  He wondered whether, accidental witness to it all, he too had partaken of the miracle.

  What had it meant, creating a man and woman who looked like father and daughter, and putting them side by side for a half hour in their whole lives, and showing them to Shingo?

  There she had sat, knee to knee with a man who could only be her father; and only because the person she had been waiting for had not come.

  Was such the way, Shingo could only mutter to himself, with human life?

  The man got up in some confusion as the train pulled into Totsuka. Taking his hat from the luggage rack, he dropped it at Shingo’s feet. Shingo picked it up for him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Without bothering to dust it, he put it on.

  ‘Very odd.’ Shingo at length felt free to speak. ‘They were strangers.’

  ‘They looked alike, but they weren’t gotten up alike.’

  ‘Gotten up?’

  ‘The woman paid attention to herself, and the man was a shambles.’

  ‘But that’s the way it is – girls done up in the best, fathers in rags.’

  ‘Their clothes were on two completely different levels.’

  Shingo had to nod his assent. ‘The girl got off in Yokohama. And the minute she left it seemed to me too that the man went to pieces.’

  ‘He was in pieces from the beginning.’

  ‘But it happened in such a hurry. It struck home, somehow. He was a good deal younger than I am.’

  ‘Well, there’s no doubt about it.’ Shuichi threw the matter off with a joke. ‘An old man looks better when he’s out with a young girl. How is it with you, Father?’

  ‘You youngsters are envious.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. There’s something uncomfortable about a handsome man out with a pretty girl, and you feel sorry for an ugly man when the girl is beautiful. Let’s leave the beauties to old people.’

  But the strangeness of the pair was still with Shingo.

  ‘Maybe they really are father and daughter. Maybe she’s a girl he fathered away from home somewhere and left behind. They’ve never introduced themselves to each other, and don’t know they are father and child.’

  Shuichi looked away.

  Shingo was a bit startled at his own remark.

  Having made what seemed like an innuendo, however, he had to go ahead: ‘Twenty years from now the same thing may happen to you.’

  ‘That was what you were trying to say, was it? Well, I’m not that sort of sentimental fatalist myself. The bullets used to go whistling by my ears, and not one of them touched me. I may have left behind a child or two in the islands or in China. It’s nothing at all, meeting your own bastard and not recognizing it, when you’ve had bullets whistling by your ear. No threat to your life. And then there’s no guarantee that Kinu will have a girl, and if she says it isn’t mine that’s enough for me.’

  ‘Wartime and peacetime are not the same thing.’

  ‘But maybe another war is on its way. And maybe the other one is still haunting people like me. Still somewhere inside us.’ Shuichi spoke with asperity. ‘There was something a little strange about her, and you were attracted to her, and so you go on with these imaginings of yours. Men always get caught when a woman is just a little different.’

  ‘And that’s all right, is it? Because a woman is a little different, you get her pregnant and leave her to bring up the child?’

  ‘I don’t want it. It’s the woman herself.’

  Shingo fell silent.

  ‘The woman that got off in Yokohama – she’s a free agent. Perfectly free.’

  ‘Free?’

  ‘She’s not married, and she’d come if you called. She may put on airs, but she doesn’t have a decent living, and she’s tired of the insecurity.’

  The words upset Shingo deeply. ‘So that’s how far you’ve fallen,’ he said.

  ‘Kikuko’s free too.’ There was challenge in Shuichi’s tone. ‘She’s not a soldier and she’s not a prisoner.’

  ‘What do you mean saying that about your own wife? Have you said so to her?’

  ‘Suppose you say it to her yourself.’

  ‘You’re telling me I should send her away?’ Shingo fought to control his voice.

  ‘Not at all.’ Shuichi too was carefully controlling his voice. ‘We were saying that the girl who got off in Yokohama was free. Don’t you suppose you thought they were father and daughter because she was about Kikuko’s age?’

  Shingo was taken by surprise. ‘It was just that if they weren’t father and daughter they looked enough alike to make it a miracle.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to be all that impressed with.’

  ‘It was to me.’ But now, having had it pointed out that Kikuko had been on his mind, he felt a tightening in the throat.

  The men with the maple branches got off in Ofuna.

  ‘Why don’t we go to Shinshu to see the maples?’ said Shingo, watching the branches move off down the platform. ‘With Yasuko and Kikuko too.’

  ‘I don’t have much interest in maple leaves myself.’

  ‘I’d like to see the old mountains again. Yasuko says she has dreams that her house is going to pieces.’

  ‘It is in bad shape.’

  ‘We ought to repair it while there’s time.’

  ‘The frame is strong, and it’s not going to pieces exactly. But if you were to start repairing it – what would be the point?’

  ‘We may want a place to retire. And then you may have to get out of the city again some day yourself.’

  ‘I’ll stay behind this time and watch the house. Kikuko can go have a look at the old place. She’s never seen it.’

  ‘How is Kikuko these days?’

  ‘Well, she seems a little bored, now that my affair is over.’

  Shingo smiled wryly.

  4

  Once again it was Sunday, and Shuichi seemed to have gone once more to the fish pond.

  Lining up a row of cushions that had been airing in the hall, Shingo lay down in the warm autumn sun, his head on his arm.

  Teru was sunning herself on the stone step below him.

  In the breakfast room Yasuko was reading through the pile of newspapers on her knee, perhaps ten days’ worth of them.

  When she came on something interesting she would tell Shingo. It happened so often that Shingo’s answers tended to be perfunctory.

  ‘I wish you’d stop this business of reading all the newspapers on Sundays,’ he said, turning over sluggishly.

  At the alcove in the parlor, Kikuko was putting together an arrangement of red crow-gourds.

  ‘You found them on the mountain?’

  ‘Yes. They seemed very pretty.’

  ‘Are there still some left?’

  ‘Just a few. Five or six.’

  Three gourds hung from the vine in her hand.

  Every morning from the washstand Shingo could see red gourds on the mountain, above the pampas grass. Here inside the parlor they were an even more dazzling red.

  Kikuko also came into his range of vision.

  There was an indescribable freshness about the line from her jaw to her throat. It was not the product of a single generation, thought Shingo, somehow saddened.

  Perhaps because the style of her hair set off the neck and throat, her face seemed a little thin.

  Shingo had of course been aware all along of th
e beauty of that line, and the long, slender throat. Was it that, given the considerable distance and the angle from which he was watching her, it stood out in more beauty than usual?

  Perhaps the autumn radiance added something.

  That line from jaw to throat spoke first of maidenly freshness. It was beginning to swell a little, however, and that maidenliness would soon disappear.

  ‘Just one more,’ Yasuko called. ‘Here’s a very interesting one.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s about America. A place called Buffalo, New York. Buffalo. A man had his left ear cut off in an automobile accident, and went to a doctor. The doctor ran off to where the accident happened and found the ear, all dripping blood, and stuck it back on. And it’s worked perfectly since.’

  ‘They say you can put a finger back on if you do it soon enough.’

  ‘Oh?’ She read on for a time, and seemed to remember something. ‘I suppose that’s true of husband and wife too. If you put them back together soon enough they’ll stick. But it’s been too long.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Shingo, not really asking a question.

  ‘Don’t you suppose it’s that way with Fusako?’

  ‘Aihara’s disappeared,’ answered Shingo lightly, ‘and we don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.’

  ‘Oh, we could find that out if we tried. But what’s to happen?’

  ‘So Granny still has her regrets. Give them up. We sent in the divorce notice long ago.’

  ‘I’ve been good at giving things up since I was a girl. It’s just that I have her and the two children right here in front of me, and wonder what’s to become of them.’

  Shingo did not answer.

  ‘Fusako’s not the prettiest girl in the world. And suppose she were to remarry – it would be really too much for Kikuko to have the two children left on her hands.’

  ‘Kikuko and Shuichi would have to live somewhere else. And it would be up to Granny to raise the children.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone could call me lazy, but how old do you think I am?’

  ‘Do your best and leave what’s undone to the gods. Where’s Fusako?’

  ‘They’ve gone to see the Buddha. Children are very strange. Satoko almost got run over once on her way back, and she still loves the place. She’s always crying to go there.’