3 stars 

 

tl;dr – funny how the mountain only made a sound once lol 

 

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   The Sound of the Mountain is a rather sombre take on the vignettes of daily life. The seasons pass from summer to winter and back to summer again, with the leaves changing their colours and the rest of nature making its own little self-adjustments too, but in the house of Ogata Shingo, not much seems to change – or does it? The back cover of my edition declared Yasunari Kawataba’s prose to be like poetry, and on a certain level,  I can indeed see why this comparison works. There is a lyrical hesitance to the sentences, words and phrases resting like water lilies on the surface of a still pond under which something nameless and shapeless is moving, twisting in and around and over itself. It’s something that longs to emerge, longs to swim aside those lilies and make them move through the power of its own existence, and yet like a tortured soul it remains hiding in the depths, as if afraid of its own shadow, afraid to disturb the fragile existence of peace that seems to exist all around it. 

 

   But no man is an island, are they? Shingo grapples with the impending doom of his own mortality – funnily enough, sans any kind of diagnosis – while the world does rage on around him, while the marriages of his children disintegrate with the velocity of continental drift and tectonic collisions, and all his old friends and acquaintances keep dying as if to just remind him that he is potentially next. From one perspective, it’s actually a bona fide tragedy – one that I have picked up on when reading other Japanese authors as well – that Shingo cannot share how he feels with anyone around him, even his daughter-in-low Kikuko with whom he seems to be closer than his own wife and children. There is this constant shadow hanging over him, one that pervades his every action even if it’s just getting the train or sitting at home, but he cannot share it. Or perhaps, more accurately, he, and the world in which he exists, won’t let him share it. The reticence that defines this whole book – from the punctuation to the entire worldview of its protagonist – condemns its contents to exist in a perpetual state of limbo, one where no one can be really open and where all must suffer or exist in silence. At some point, you kind of just wish something would happen, that the shadow beneath the water could surface, even just momentarily, and leave the pond a little bit different to how it used to be – but alas, in a book like this, that could never happen.