Father, Son & Kimi

To THE MOUNTAIN -- Bradford Smith -- Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).

In an age of novels there have been few authentic ones laid in Japan, fewer that go beyond the surface strangeness played upon in such books as Carl Fallas' The Wooden Pillow (TIME, Jan. 20). The appearance last week of a first novel by a young Westerner which gave evidence of a deeper understanding of modern Japan was therefore of more than passing importance.

In To the Mountain a poor family within a few rice grains of starvation sells the oldest 'daughter, Kimi, to a procurer when she is not yet 16. She is apprenticed to a house in the Yoshiwara district of Tokyo, where the streets are well kept and the architecture more uniform than in most other quarters. When her year's apprenticeship is up and she is ready for work, a rich businessman named Yamano takes a liking to her, reserves her for himself. Naive, lonely, she is soon fond of him.

Yamano has and deserves little affection in his own family. His son, Shigeo, is a university student, sensitive to the newest thinking of the West, out of sympathy with his father's commercialism, his reactionary social code. Some of Shigeo's friends are arrested on suspicion of Communism. Shigeo, fearing that he may be implicated with them, is reassured by his old friend Major Honjo, a kind-hearted Christian convert who carries on a one -- man rescue mission among the Yoshiwara women. At one of Major Honjo's Sunday Bible readings Shigeo meets and falls in love with Kimi. the latest addition to the Major's household. Old Yamano, deprived of his mistress, discovers her whereabouts from his unsuspecting son. From this point on the depth of feeling increases between Yamano, who still desires Kimi, and his son, who can only resent without understanding his father's prohibition of further visits to her. In the end the traditional power of the family and the apparently hopeless future for Shigeo's type of liberalism in Japan prevail over the love of the young people, and instead of risking marriage they commit suicide together.

Author Smith writes with lucid detachment of the formal yet vividly human behavior of his Japanese, the confusion in the minds of the young generation about their duties, their chances in life. The extremes of poverty and industrialism in Tokyo, the meaningless political suicides, the continual troop movements toward Manchuria, are keenly described. Despite several soft episodes and what will seem to many readers an over-facile ending, the novel has the steady strength of an almost reportorial reality.

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