Sound of the Mountain

By day Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundation of Shingo's life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and uneasy stirrings of sexual desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments - and the tiny shifts of loyalty and affection that threaten to sever it irreparably - Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting.