Hello Gentle Reader
I have read so many Japanese authors. From Yukio Mishima to Natsuo Kirino – with Haruki Murakami in between the two; and also gave Kenzaburo Oe, a try as well. Each author writes about the Japanese country. Two have seen the World Wars, and another one – along with the two that saw the World Wars, had witnessed the disgrace and fall of the Japanese Empire. Each one describes the Japan that they know. When I read “Real World,” by Natsuo Kirino I had discovered the Japan that I know was the present day one. The one of the cramming for school exams, to the point you’re about ready to pass out, or you start coughing up blood, and you overdose on caffeine. There are the polluting warnings everywhere – warning that the air contains a high amount of particles, in the air that could cause respiratory system damage. What was shown in the general sense of the work by Natsuo Kirino was apathy. There was that sense that nothing good was coming out of working hard, and that all you had in life was that you had to work hard and that was it. The moment that you were born you were groomed to be whatever it is that was decided for you. And the only way to get there was by working hard and cramming. Haruki Murakami’s work was and usually is rather surreal. The world that his characters inhabit is like our own and yet different. Something is amiss – aloof; the mundane is more extraordinary then the extraordinary itself. There is a general sense of alienation. The characters are cut off from the world around them. The people that walk by are little more than shadows, in an absolute void. Yet throughout this alienation and isolation, there are extraordinary moments. Talking cats, leeches that rain from the sky, a well that can swallow your dreams, television sets that can take you from reality and into the televised alternative dimension – and yet in the end (as a friend described it) everyone goes home, listens to jazz music and eats ramen noodles. The Japan of Kenzaburo Oe, is rather different. It’s an ambiguous and enigmatic place. It is a place that does not make sense. Oe’s fiction is rather personalized to the point of (forgive me for I am about to sin) being selfish. His writing about his son Hikari is often personalized and often repeat themselves in every novel that he writes, where a handicapped or brain damaged child – usually a son; comes up. In this respect Kenzaburo Oe, is exercising himself in these stories – often called ‘the idiot boy,’ stories. His first and award winning novel “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids,” deal with his childhood home, and the barbaric nature of the human race – kind of like William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” Yet the Japan that Kenzaburo Oe, writes about shows his own ambivalent attitude towards his own country. Yukio Mishima’s country is however far different then the left and liberal leanings that Kenzaburo Oe’s are – both Mishima and Oe are on the different sides of the political scale; that is just know by most readers of these two authors or by people who have an interest in Japanese literature. Yukio Mishima’s Japan was much different. It is a world that had been disgraced following the defeat of World War II, and the kind of loss of purpose that followed Japans defeat in World War II. Yukio Mishima’s writing is characterized by a sense of nihilistic feeling and disgust for the honour of Japan, and the infection of westernization that is influencing his country – however Yukio Mishima a descendant of a samurai family, believed in the power and divinity of the empire. However in the end Yukio Mishima left his country he beloved and committed ritual suicide, when his coup had failed.
Yasunari Kawabata is different than all of the other above authors. He began writing before the Second World War. He has not seen what Japan has become today. He does not have an imbecile child. His politics where never really shown in his writing. Yasunari Kawabata has written about a traditional and beautiful Japan. A Japan that is participating in the world, as a whole in the twentieth century, however is still strictly its own country. It participants in the Imperial Age, and is a world player. However it is strictly its own country. However throughout time there can certainly be a different shift in his work. He gradually begins to incorporate certain elements of history – which at the time were most likely contemporary events. If one looks at “Snow Country,” by Yasunari Kawabata, and then at “The Sound of the Mountain,” there are small subtle changes in how certain details are presented. For one, in “Snow Country,” there (from my memory) was no real discussion of the war even hint of ‘the war.’ There was no discussion of American soldiers or any tourists whatsoever. However with “The Sound of the Mountain,” there do come these changes. There are American soldiers on a train, a westerner on the train who cannot speak Japanese. Yet throughout the novel Yasunari Kawabata keeps them all at a distance. They are just details. They have no real characterization and are not painted with any political brush. They are simply described as if they were a tree or a flower – meaningless and just part of the scenery. But this change does not affect the novel; it certainly shows the changing landscape of Japan after their defeat. However as if a twist of irony, it was during this time that Japan began exporting its culture – those monster movies, cartoons and Japanese styled comic books have becoming something of an interest throughout the years; in this time as well with Japan being opened up and able to export their culture novelists like Yasunari Kawabata (the Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-sixty eight and first Japanese Nobel Prize winner in Literature) and Yukio Mishima (a protégé of sorts to Yasunari Kawabata) to become literary pheromone’s outside their country – which probably led to Yasunari Kawabata being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Personally speaking, it is not really right to call “The Sound of the Mountain,” a family chronicle. The events of the novel do center on an aging patriarch Shingo and his family and his views of the events that happen through on out. A master of the psychological novel, and exploring the psyche of his characters through the external world around them, and providing the external world with metaphors of their own thoughts and perspectives. A good example would be when Shingo walks around by the sunflowers, and they remind him of heads, and he wishes he could just dismember his own head from his body and take it for a cleaning – the main character is having memory lapses, as well as experience or rather hearing strange noises that only he can hear; such as the rumbling of the mountain that awakes him in the night and he decides is a omen of death.
Shingo’s daily routines do not change, but he begins to question his relationship with everyone in his family. His daughter Fusako is divorced from her husband (her parents had arranged that marriage). It in itself turns out to be a failure. His son Shuichi is having an affair with another woman. He and his wife Kikuko have yet to produce a child. Shingo begins to wonder if his poor behaviour as a father and not being a loving husband has played a part in his family’s dysfunction. Shingo loved his wife’s Yasuko’s younger sister. However she died as a young woman, and so it could be summarized that Shingo had settled with the second best, with Yasuko. Even Kikuko causes some erotic feelings to arise inside of Shingo. It can plainly be seen as well, in how he treats her, almost fatherly. Kikuko also showers, Shingo with love, and takes care of him and helps around the house.
The novel is much different than “Snow Country,” in many ways. Yet each one shares similarities. “Snow Country,” started off as a short story and eventually became a novel. “The Sound of the Mountain,” the chapters appear like short stories – little satellites or moons orbiting around the larger novel itself. Each one adding a different characteristic to the novel itself.
It is a wonderful novel, written in the grace and the beauty that I have learned to love and respect of Yasunari Kawabata. But it is also ambiguous and lucid. That is just something though that one expects to find when reading Yasunari Kawabata – he was part of the art movement with Riichi Yokomitsu, and other writers, titled Shinkankakuha which has been translated as “neo-impressionism,” but that is incorrect of what it actually was. It’s really more about “new sensations(list).” It is modernist, and Kawabata uses very poetic and lyrical prose full of metaphors and dreams to really move a story that may or not be there at all. However he probed the mind of his characters, and showed the external world as a world just like the internal world of their psyches.
“The Sound of the Mountain,” is a very mature work. It has all of the typical writing styles of Yasunari Kawabata; but also shows him miniaturizing life moments in brief chapters. There is the psychological probing, a sense of melancholy and a desire of nostalgia and there certainly are some regrets as well. Everyday Shingo is faced with his own mistakes – the mistakes of his son and his daughter. His son’s infidelity, his daughters divorce – and the despair that his daughter-in-law feels towards her husband and his affair. Even worst though is when his son asks him the question itself that Shingo himself wrestles with:
‘“I’ve been thinking a little,” muttered Shuichi. “About Father’s life.”
“About my life?”
“Oh, nothing very definite. But if I had to summarize my speculations, I suppose they would go something like this: has Father been a success or a failure?”’
There will be no denying it, if anything Shingo had failed miserably with his children’s lives, and being at the age of sixty-two there is very little he could do rectify the mistakes that he has done. These are the guilt’s that he himself is forced to live with. He also realizes that his own mortality is coming up to its expiry date.
This novel is a powerful meditation on family, life, aging, death/dying. Though the images and the perceptions of the mountain, the birds flying, one of Teru’s puppies, the insects and the sounds they produce in the summer evenings, the cherry tree in the back garden, or even the two pine tree’s he see’s every morning on his way to work – they all provide new sensations and meanings and images for Shingo. Each one mapping his own psyche and his musings of family, ageing, mortality, companionship, and love.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
*And Remember: Downloading Books Illegally is Thievery and Wrong.*
M. Mary
P.S. Gentle Reader: the previous blog "Unforunate News," should have been published Wednesday February 8th of 2012 but unforunatly I had it saved, as a draft. I apologize for the confusion.
