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The Sound of the Mountain

Part of Vintage International

Author Yasunari Kawabata
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Paperback
$16.95 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale May 28, 1996 | 288 Pages | 9780679762645
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Winner of the Nobel Prize 

From the Nobel Prize laureate comes the tale of an elderly Tokyo businessman, Ogata Shingo, who 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 his life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law, Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and sexual desire. Out of this web of attachments Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting, as he charts the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker.
  • WINNER | 1968
    Nobel Prize
Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Japan’s most distinguished novelists, he published his first stories while he was still in high school, graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His short story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Kawabata authored numerous novels, including Snow Country (1956), which cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent voices of his time, as well as Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1970), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). He served as the chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan for several years and in 1959 he was awarded the Goethe Medal in Frankfurt. Kawabata died in 1972. View titles by Yasunari Kawabata

About

Winner of the Nobel Prize 

From the Nobel Prize laureate comes the tale of an elderly Tokyo businessman, Ogata Shingo, who 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 his life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law, Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and sexual desire. Out of this web of attachments Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting, as he charts the gradual, reluctant narrowing of a human life. Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker.

Awards

  • WINNER | 1968
    Nobel Prize

Author

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka in 1899. In 1968 he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of Japan’s most distinguished novelists, he published his first stories while he was still in high school, graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924. His short story “The Izu Dancer,” first published in 1925, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955. Kawabata authored numerous novels, including Snow Country (1956), which cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent voices of his time, as well as Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1970), The Master of Go (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). He served as the chairman of the P.E.N. Club of Japan for several years and in 1959 he was awarded the Goethe Medal in Frankfurt. Kawabata died in 1972. View titles by Yasunari Kawabata

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