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The Sound of the Mountain (National Book Award Winner)
  • Published: 7 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141192628
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $34.99

The Sound of the Mountain (National Book Award Winner)

A Novel

Formats & editions
Paperback
28 May 1996
EBook
28 Mar 2011
Paperback
7 Mar 2011
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Kawabata's serenely observed and enormously affecting portrait of old age

Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing.
  • Published: 7 March 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141192628
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $34.99

About the author

Yasunari Kawabata

Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of Japan's most distinguished novelists. Born in Osaka in 1899, he published his first stories while he was still in high school. Among his major novels published across the world are Snow Country (1956), Thousand Cranes (1959), The Sound of the Mountain (1972), and Beauty and Sadness (1975). Kawabata was found dead, by his own hand, in 1972.
YK

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Praise for The Sound of the Mountain (National Book Award Winner)

Kawabata is a poet of the gentlest shades, of the evanescent, the imperceptible

Commonweal

A rich, complicated novel. . . . Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata's is the closest to poetry

The New York Times Book Review