A Kawabata novel that I have mixed feeling about. Unlike The Old Capital, this one has a more meandering plot and a vague, open ending that becomes Kawabata's signature's style. The plot revolves around Ogata Shingo's family, whose children were strayed: the son has an affair with a geisha, while the daughter has become estranged from her husband. These were the surface-layer issues, however, as we found out that beyond this, there were dissatisfaction and pent up frustrations that led to conflicting desires, threatening to tear the family apart.

That being said, none of these tumultuous relationship never shows its wreckage to the surface. In all but small parts of the book and perhaps the last few chapters, we only see the small glimpses, vignettes of family lives that seemingly idyllic and peaceful in first glance, but hide its fangs and bitterness in family members' offhand insults, sarcasms, and ignorance of others.

I found this to be one of the interesting part actually, what differentiates Kawabata (and other Japanese authors in general) to Western authors: while Western authors prefer to strike and to bring the conflict as open and as confrontational as possible, Japanese authors like Kawabata prefer to marinade in it, to not dive into the why and how, but to understand of what impact of the broken relationship to the wider, extended family, and what does it mean to one's existence?

Here, what we have is a meditation of what it means to be a parents: whether the success of one's parenthood is defined by one's child's ability to build a family own its own – or should we separate the adulthood of our children from our own?

Overall, a pretty enjoyable read, though I'd prefer to have deeper characterisations that can provide more nuance or serve as a tangible anchor for me to the story itself.

Moments of beauty but on the whole the book lacked a certain vitality. It's not a book where anything happens. It is, if I am to be blunt, boring.

#JapaneseJune Book #5.
2.5 stars.

I'm not quite sure how to rate this particular book. For its modest length, it took me longer than I thought it would to read it, and I think for the most part this was because I found it incredibly difficult to concentrate on for the first half of the book. Once I started focusing solely on this book on my train journeys to and from work, I found it much easier to sink into - reading it at home with distractions all around was out of the question.

The story is, from what I can tell, typical of Kawabata's style - very beautifully written but slow and melancholic to the core. It follows the character of Shingo, and elderly man who does not seem to have a very loving relationship with his family. The only person within his household that he seems to have any kind of connection with is his daughter-in-law Kikuko, a seemingly lonely soul who tries to main a cheerful air whilst dealing with her philandering husband.

The novel doesn't really have a strong plot line, other than the adultery of Shingo's son and its effect on Kikuko, but I didn't really expect there to be one. Having read Snow Country previously, I had an inkling of what to expect. However, I didn't have the concentration problems with that book as I did with The Sound of the Mountain - at the beginning of the novel, I kept forgetting characters' names, getting them mixed up with each other, and couldn't really follow their conversations all that well. Part of me wonders if it was my distraction, and part of me wonders if this was Kawabata's intent - to meld the reader with Shingo, seeing things through his confused, ageing eyes and forgetting key elements along the way. I don't know, I can't exactly ask the author, but it did intrigue me.

I will continue to read Kawabata's novels, but I will try and make sure that I have some uninterrupted reading time because I feel like when I'm in the zone, I appreciate his writing a lot more.

Over the years I must have read this novel a half dozen times or more, and each time the experience is more rewarding. I'm in the middle of re-reading five Kawabata novels for a project I'm working on, and with each novel I finish I feel that my reading soul has been cleansed and elevated.

I read this time as closely as ever, summarizing for myself each chapter, and each section of each chapter; such a slow and careful reading really underlined for me how sublime this novel is.

It has to be said, too, that Edward Seidensticker's translation shows how brilliantly he understood Kawabata's intentions for this novel, and what an impressive writer he was himself.

I'm now in the mind of re-reading Kawabata's best work every year.

Ono na šta me je ovaj roman podsetio najviše je Ozeov film Tokyo Story, sa tom ključnom razlikom da gde se Oze oslanja na retku, ali prisutnu ljudskost u svojim likovima, Kavabata je daleko ambivalentniji. Možda su se i, direktno ili indirektno, Oze i Kavabata medjusobno inspirisali, pošto su njihova dela tu negde u slično vreme i ugledala svetlost dana.

Reći da je ovo neuspešan roman je sve sem tačno. Kavabata svojom vitkom i elegantnom prozom (paragrafi su obično dužine dva-tri reda) piše o starosti, o porodici, o tremorima koje trpi Japan suočen sa vesternizacijom društva. Šingo, protagonista i najstariji član svoje porodice, počinje da zaboravlja i počinje da čuje zvuk planine – sopstvene smrti. Te ne dolazi zaključak da ovo nije baš najveselije štivo niotkuda. A meni je možda ta veselost (ili makar humanost – Kavabata je i po tom pitanju dosta štur) u ovom trenutku i najviše bila potrebna. I greota, znam, da dobar roman (možda čak i odličan) profilterisan kroz trenutnog mene ostane za mene tako nedorečen, tako gotovo prazan, da ne mogu da kažem da mi se stvarno dopao.

Možda ću mu se opet vratiti, u nekom drugom trenutku u vremenu, i možda to tad bude neka druga (tokijska) priča.

3