The Sound of the Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

that’s strange. Mr Aida didn’t drink.’
    ‘That’s true. He had asthma, and when he had his stroke it was the mucus that killed him. But he didn’t drink. He was always wandering around with a medicine bottle in his hand.’
    And yet he had strode into the dream like a brave roisterer. The image floated up vividly in Shingo’s mind.
    ‘And did you and Mr Aida have a drinking party?’
    ‘I didn’t have a drop. Aida was walking toward me, but I woke up before he had a chance to sit down.’
    ‘It’s not very pleasant, dreaming of dead people.’
    ‘Maybe they’ve come for me.’
    He had reached an age when most of his friends were dead. It was perhaps natural that he should dream of the dead.
    Neither the old cabinetmaker nor Aida had appeared to him as dead, however. They had come into his dreams as living people.
    And the figures of both, as they had come into the dreams, were still vivid in his mind. They were much clearer than his usual memories of the two men. Aida’s face, red from drink, was of a sort that the living Aida had never presented; and yet Shingo remembered such details as the distended pores.
    Why should it be that, remembering the other two so clearly, he could not call up the face of the girl who had touched him, could not remember who she might be?
    He asked whether, from feelings of guilt, he had managed to forget. But such did not seem to be the case. He had not been awake long enough for more than a certain sensual disappointment.
    He was not especially interested in the fact that it had come to him in a dream.
    He did not describe this part of the dream to Yasuko. Kikuko and Fusako were getting dinner. He could hear their voices in the kitchen. They seemed a trifle too loud.

4
    Every night locusts would come flying in from the cherry tree.
    Shingo walked over to the trunk of the tree.
    Engulfed by the sound of whirring wings, he looked up. He was astonished at the number of locusts, and astonished too at the noise of their wings. It was as if a flock of sparrows had started up.
    Locusts were flying off as he looked into the great tree.
    All the clouds in the sky were racing toward the east. The weather forecast had said that that most ominous of days, the two-hundred-tenth after the beginning of spring, * was likely to pass without incident, but Shingo suspected that there would be winds and showers to bring down the temperature.
    ‘Has something happened?’ Kikuko came up. ‘I heard locusts and wondered.’
    ‘They do make you think there might have been an accident, don’t they? You hear about the wings of ducks and geese, but these are just as impressive.’
    Kikuko was holding a needle and red thread. ‘It wasn’t the wings. It was the screeching all of a sudden, as if something might be threatening them.’
    ‘I hadn’t noticed that so much.’
    He looked into the room from which she had come. Spread out in it were the makings of a child’s dress, the cloth from an ancient singlet of Yasuko’s. ‘Does Satoko still play with locusts?’
    Kikuko nodded. A faint motion of her lips seemed to shape the word ‘yes’.
    Locusts were strange and interesting creatures to Satoko, a child of the city; and there was something in her nature that responded to the sport. At first she had been afraid when Fusako had given her one to play with. Then Fusako had cut off the wings, and afterwards whenever the child caught a locust she would come running up to anyone nearby, Kikuko or Yasuko or whomever, to have the wings clipped.
    Yasuko hated the practice.
    Fusako had not always been that sort of girl, she grumbled. Her husband had ruined her.
    Yasuko had blanched when she found a swarm of red ants dragging off a wingless locust.
    She was not, on the whole, a person to be moved by such matters. Shingo was both amused and disturbed.
    Her recoil, as from a poisonous vapor, was perhaps a sign of some evil foreboding. Shingo suspected that locusts were not the problem.
    Satoko was an