576
RICHARD HOWARD
detail, of memorable articulation, is the undertaking of apocalypse, the
enterprise which holds that all reality - all that 'has ever happened or
will happen - is contained by, is the contents of, an infinite and eternal
human body, the body of each of us, and that at certain moments, the
moment of love, the moment of death, moments to which nothing is
ulterior - at such moments, one hundred years of solitude are realized
out of time. As each character in this visionary recital discovers, whether
surviving to 115 like Ursula Buendia or dying at 20 like the last Aurelia–
no, truth "occurs not in the order of man's conventional time, but con–
centrates a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexist in
one instant." The book's four hundred pages exist, a magnificent super–
erogation, to enforce upon us the knowledge that in its last moment the
whole of life will last only a moment.
* * *
Strung out like a
haiku-sequence
between a failure of
memory
on
the first page and a failure of hearing on the last,
The Sound of the
Mountain
is composed of so many succinct enclosures, so many par–
titions and separations, that it abjures whatever ongoing energy might
drag its events to a conclusion: things do not come together and have
an ending, they disintegrate and recommence. This account of the failure
of a family takes place - no, even that phrase is too transitive, too
aimed
to indulge what happens, or what fails to happen,
in
Kamakura,
a mainline suburb of Tokyo within something less than a year. The
Ogatas, a saturated family molecule - Shingo and his wife
in
their
sixties, their son and daughter-in-law who live with them and the son's
mistress who does not, their daughter estranged from her husband and
beset with two daughters of her own - find themselves by circumstance
and inertia (World War II is
very
much a trauma, evoked, glorified,
blamed, in any case accredited ) obliged for the time to live together.
There is some money, not much good will or fun, and no love: divorce
and abortion and suicide become matters of course, ceremonies of the
quotidian upon which to brood, not events of moral persuasion, for the
very events they abrogate - wedlock and procreation and mortality–
are secularized, reduced to the manipulative level of aesthetic arrange–
ments in a society without trust in its own traditions, without the sanc–
tions of ... sanctity.
It is no accident, indeed it is a matter of structural significance, that
Kawabata's novel (his first to be published here since he won the Nobel
Prize in 1968, it was published in 1954 in Japan) takes, then, as we
might say a dye takes, or a glue, and mean it undertakes to work, dur–
ing just the period when Japan adopted the Western style of reckoning
the age of its citizens: from birth, not from conception.
The
legalism
