The Sound of the Mountain Read Online Free PDF

obdurate child, and when the adult in question had surrendered and cut the wings she would still be dawdling about. Then, with somber, shadowy eyes, she would throw the insect, its wings freshly cut, out into the garden, as if to hide it. She knew that adults would be watching her.
    Fusako apparently poured forth her complaints to Yasuko every day, but it seemed, from the fact that she never touched upon the question of when she would be leaving, that she had not yet brought herself to the heart of the matter.
    When they were in bed Yasuko would pass the day’s complaints on to Shingo. Though he did not pay a great deal of attention, he would feel that something had been left out.
    He knew that as her father he should step forward to give Fusako advice; but she was thirty and married, and matters are not simple for fathers in such cases. It would not be easy to accommodate a woman with two children. A decision was postponed from day to day, as if the principals were all waiting for nature to take its course.
    ‘Isn’t Father nice to Kikuko,’ said Fusako.
    Kikuko and Shuichi were both at the dinner table.
    ‘Yes, of course,’ said Yasuko. ‘I try to be good to her myself.’
    Fusako’s manner had not suggested that she required an answer. There was laughter in the tone of Yasuko’s gratuitous answer, but it was meant to quell Fusako all the same.
    ‘After all, she’s good to us.’
    Kikuko turned crimson.
    Yasuko’s second remark was uncomplicated enough. It contained something like a thrust at her daughter, however.
    It seemed to suggest that she liked her happy daughter-in-law and disliked her unhappy daughter. One might have suspected cruelty and malice. Shingo sensed something like self-loathing too. He detected a similar vein in himself. Yet it seemed strange to him that Yasuko, woman and aging mother, should have given way to it in the presence of her daughter.
    ‘I don’t agree that she’s all that kind,’ said Shuichi. ‘She’s not to her husband.’ The joke was not successful.
    It should have been clear to all of them, to Shuichi and Yasuko as well as to Kikuko herself, that Shingo was particularly gentle toward Kikuko. The fact scarcely needed mentioning, and somehow mention of it saddened him.
    Kikuko was for him a window looking out of a gloomy house. His blood kin were not as he would wish them to be, and if they were not able to live as they themselves wished to live, then the impact of the blood relation became leaden and oppressive. His daughter-in-law brought relief.
    Kindness toward her was a beam lighting isolation. It was a way of pampering himself, of bringing a touch of mellowness into his life.
    For her part, Kikuko did not indulge in dark conjectures on the psychology of the aged, nor did she seem afraid of him.
    Fusako’s remark, he felt, brushed against his secret.
    It had been made at dinner some three or four evenings before.
    Under the cherry tree, Shingo thought of it, and of Satoko and the locust wings.
    ‘Is Fusako having a nap?’
    ‘Yes.’ Kikuko looked into his face. ‘She’s giving Kuniko hers.’
    ‘She’s a funny child, Satoko. Whenever Fusako gives the baby its nap she goes along and lies there clinging to her mother’s back. That’s when she behaves.’
    ‘It’s sweet, really.’
    ‘Yasuko can’t stand the child. But when she gets to be fourteen or fifteen she’ll be snoring away, the image of her grandmother.’
    Kikuko did not seem to understand.
    She called after Shingo as he turned to go off.
    ‘You went dancing?’
    ‘What?’ Shingo looked around. ‘You know about it, do you?’
    Two nights earlier he had gone to a dance hall with the girl from his office.
    Today was Sunday; so it would appear that the girl, Tanizaki Eiko, had told Shuichi the day before, and Shuichi had passed the news on to Kikuko.
    Shingo had not been dancing in years. The girl had clearly been surprised at his invitation. She had said that if she went out with him