The Sound of the Mountain [Paperback]

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’sThe Sound of the Mountainis a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age — the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life, along with the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate its closing.
 
By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo’s life:  his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time.“Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible.”
—Commonweal
 
“A rich, complicated novel. . . . Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata’s is the closest to poetry.”
—The New York Times Book ReviewYasunari Kawabatawas born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Japan’s most distinguished novelists, he published his first stories while he was still in high school, graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His short story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared inThe Atlantic Monthlyin 1955. Kawabata authored numerous novels, includingSnow Country(1956), which cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent voices of his time, as well asThousand Cranes(1959),The Sound of the Mountain(1970),The Master of Go(1972), andBeauty and Sadness(1975). He served as the chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan for several years and in 1959 he was awarded the Goethe-medal in Frankl“#