Kathy P. (kathyplank) reviewed on 11/29/2006 + 46 more book reviews

"The Sound of the Mountain" is one of Yasunari Kawabata's most important works. Its quality is luminous and intense; its concern is with the anxieties and desires of an old man, Shingo, who lives with his family in a suburb of Tokyo. It is Shingo who hears "the sound of the mountain" - the faint rumble in the hills that is a muffled hint of unknown occurrences and a foreboding of death. And his emotions - the affecting (perhaps even sexual desire) he feels for his daughter-in-law, the increasing tensios of his relations with his wife, son, and daughter - are also muffled, indistinct, subtle, yet disturbingly powerful. The events of the novel are real and immediate, yet throughout they are touched and unified by an almost dreamlike symbolism. The resulting whole is a remarkable epxression of the unique talents of this great writer, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

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