The Sound of the Mountain

The Sound of the Mountain is by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. Its quality is both 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 affection (perhaps even sexual desire) he feels for his daughter-in-law, the increasing tension of his relations with his wife, son and daughter - are also muffled, indistinct, subtle, yet disturbingly powerful.