Book description
Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he
hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain.
The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son,
his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and
Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise,
The Sound of the Mountain
explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and
the truth we face in ageing.
Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka
in 1899 and was orphaned at the age of two. His first stories were
published while he was still in high school and he decided to become a
writer. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year
later made his first impact on Japanese letters with Izu Dancer. He
soon became a leading figure the lyrical school that offered the chief
challenge to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s. His
writings combine the two forms of the novel and the haiku poems, which
within restrictions of a rigid metre achieves a startling beauty by
its juxtaposition of opposite and incongruous terms. Snow
Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) brought him
international recognition. Kawabata died by his own hand, on April 16 1972.
The Sound of the Mountain is translated from the Japanese by
Edward G. Seidensticker (1921-2007), who was a prominent scholar of
Japanese literature.
