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The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata

What strikes me about a lot of Kawabata’s post-war fiction is its attendant silence. There are no melodramatic climaxes, no cheap tricks to shock the reader’s sensibilities. What plot contrivance, after all, could rival the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of World War II itself?

The eerie quietude of Kawabata’s post-war Japanese fiction mirrors the silence that must have descended after each horrific detonation. There could be no louder sound, and Kawabata respects this in his nuanced, quiet narratives. He doesn’t try to talk over the deafening boom or outdo it with dramatic excess. Instead of showcasing the tidal waves of human relationships, those culminations of resentment and anger that sell millions of books and movie tickets every year, he probes their undercurrents and finds ample narrative potential there. In short, he reads between the lines of family and romantic relationships, giving voice to the motives, memories, and miscommunications that plague them.