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owlectomyThe library doesn't have a JSTOR subscription, so in looking for criticism of The Sound of the Mountain, I didn't turn up very much but an odd little review from a 1970 issue of TIME magazine, which declares:
I think that review encapsulates a lot of the reasons I found the book frustrating at first: Shingo's impatience with his wife and daughter, the slow pace of events, the lack of much plot beyond the continued reminders of Shingo's aging and mortality. It's somewhat skeevy that he likes his daughter-in-law so much, though it's mitigated by the fact that he seems to care for her a lot more than her husband does.
And yet. It's very much a book of the immediate postwar -- published in 1954, taking place around 1950 -- and the shadow of the war and the American occupation hangs over the book in a way that's not a heavy symbol but is still meaningful. Shingo's son was a soldier in China, and though he doesn't have anything I could easily diagnose as PTSD it does seem like he could have been a better man if not for the war. The book is permeated with themes of loss, but it's not a book about how horrible modernization and westernization are. I'm sure that Tolkien is the wrong comparison here, but there's sort of that same elegeiac sense; one age has ended and can't be recovered.
I don't know if it's my own misreading or TIME's, but I don't think the symbolism of the nature imagery is as blatant or one-sided as the review makes it seem. The most prominent images of nature aren't the images of death and decay, but the images of rebirth. Near the end of the book there's a bit about a newspaper article saying that 2000-year-old lotus seeds have been found and sprouted. True, Shingo's not able to be his own ideal image of a family patriarch. He's not able to solve his children's problems for them. But I want to see, in the ending, a positive aspect to this. All the nature imagery seems to point to a different relationship with the world, one that's based on coexistence rather than dominion.
Not since Icelander Halldór Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata.
...
Kawabata's stylistic signature is the stringing together of minute episodes linked by association. Brilliant sunflower heads remind an old man that his own mind is fading. A girl's failure to notice new buds on a gingko tree is the first sign that she is deeply troubled. The plot moves as imperceptibly as the earth. It concerns a year in the lives of the Ogata family, particularly Shingo, the head of the household. At 62, he feels old and vaguely discontented. The light in his life comes from his new daughter-in-law Kikuko, and he is constantly made despondent by the fact that her husband is already carrying on a public affair.
Life in Miniature. He is equally depressed when his daughter's marriage collapses and she comes home with her two irritating children. Shingo is obsessed with beauty, but both his wife and daughter are ugly. He is left with the gingko tree, the sunflowers and Kikuko for comfort.
The first event of any consequence occurs—offstage—on page 167, and thereafter the book drifts to an uneasy solution. The pace is probably too slow for most Western readers. Yet for those who persevere, there is a reward. ...
I think that review encapsulates a lot of the reasons I found the book frustrating at first: Shingo's impatience with his wife and daughter, the slow pace of events, the lack of much plot beyond the continued reminders of Shingo's aging and mortality. It's somewhat skeevy that he likes his daughter-in-law so much, though it's mitigated by the fact that he seems to care for her a lot more than her husband does.
And yet. It's very much a book of the immediate postwar -- published in 1954, taking place around 1950 -- and the shadow of the war and the American occupation hangs over the book in a way that's not a heavy symbol but is still meaningful. Shingo's son was a soldier in China, and though he doesn't have anything I could easily diagnose as PTSD it does seem like he could have been a better man if not for the war. The book is permeated with themes of loss, but it's not a book about how horrible modernization and westernization are. I'm sure that Tolkien is the wrong comparison here, but there's sort of that same elegeiac sense; one age has ended and can't be recovered.
I don't know if it's my own misreading or TIME's, but I don't think the symbolism of the nature imagery is as blatant or one-sided as the review makes it seem. The most prominent images of nature aren't the images of death and decay, but the images of rebirth. Near the end of the book there's a bit about a newspaper article saying that 2000-year-old lotus seeds have been found and sprouted. True, Shingo's not able to be his own ideal image of a family patriarch. He's not able to solve his children's problems for them. But I want to see, in the ending, a positive aspect to this. All the nature imagery seems to point to a different relationship with the world, one that's based on coexistence rather than dominion.
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