The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker Read Free Book Online Page A

to notice when you open the shutters or go out to clean the veranda,’ he said.
    ‘I suppose that’s true.’
    ‘Of course it is. And you’re facing it when you come in the gate. You have to look at it whether you want to or not. Do you have so much on your mind that you come in looking at the ground?’
    ‘This will never do.’ Kikuko gave her shoulders that slight, beautiful shrug. ‘I’ll be very careful from now on to notice everything you do and imitate it.’
    For Shingo, there was a touch of sadness in the remark. ‘This won’t do either.’
    In all his life no woman had so loved him as to want him to notice everything she did.
    Kikuko continued to gaze in the direction of the gingko. ‘And some of the trees up the mountain are putting out new leaves.’
    ‘So they are. I wonder if they lost their leaves in the typhoon.’
    The mountain in Shingo’s garden was cut off by the shrine precincts, a level stretch just above. The gingko lay at the boundary, but from Shingo’s breakfast room it looked as if it were yet higher.
    It had been stripped bare on the night of the storm.
    The gingko and the cherry were the trees left bare by the wind.
    Since they were the larger of the trees around the house, they were perhaps good targets for the storm. Or was it that their leaves were especially vulnerable?
    The cherry had had a few drooping leaves even after the storm, but it had shed them since, and now stood quite naked.
    The leaves of the bamboo up the mountain had withered, perhaps because, with the ocean so near, the wind had brought in salt spray. Stalks of bamboo had broken off and blown into the garden.
    The great gingko was again sending out buds.
    Shingo faced it as he turned up the lane from the main street, and every day on his way home he looked at it. He also saw it from the breakfast room.
    ‘The gingko has a sort of strength that the cherry doesn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking the ones that live long are different from the others. It must take a great deal of strength for an old tree like that to put out leaves in the fall.’
    ‘But there’s something sad about them.’
    ‘I’ve been wondering whether they’d be as big as the leaves that came out in the spring, but they refuse to grow.’
    Besides being small, the leaves were scattered, too few to hide the branches. They seemed thin, and they were a pale yellowish color, insufficiently green.
    It was as if the autumn sun fell on a gingko that was, after all, naked.
    The trees in the shrine precincts were mostly evergreen. They seemed to be strong against wind and rain, and were quite undamaged. Above the luxuriant evergreens was the pale green of new leaves. Kikuko had just discovered them.
    Yasuko had come in through the back gate. He heard running water. She said something, but, over the sound of water, he could not make out what.
    ‘What did you say?’ he shouted.
    Kikuko helped him. ‘She says that the bush clover is blooming very nicely.’
    ‘Oh?’
    Kikuko passed on another message. ‘And she says that the pampas grass is putting out plumes.’
    ‘Oh?’
    Yasuko had something more to say.
    ‘Oh, be quiet. I can’t hear you.’
    ‘I’ll be happy to interpret.’ On the edge of laughter, Kikuko looked down.
    ‘Interpret? It’s just an old woman talking to herself.’
    ‘She says she dreamed last night that the house in Shinano was going to pieces.’
    “Oh?”
    ‘And what is your answer?’
    ‘I said “Oh,” and that’s all I have to say.’
    The sound of water stopped. Yasuko called Kikuko.
    ‘Put these in water, please, Kikuko. They were so beautiful that I had to break some off. But you take care of them, please.’
    ‘Let me show them to Father first.’
    She came in with an armful of bush clover and pampas grass.
    Yasuko had evidently washed her hands and then moistened a Shigaraki vase, which she brought in.
    ‘The amaranth next door is a beautiful color too,’ she said as she sat down.
    ‘There is