Sunflowers for Comfort

THE SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN by Yasunari Kawabata. 276 pages. Knopf $6.95.

Every autumn in the U.S., faithful as falling leaves, rumors fly that either Norman Mailer or W.H. Auden has won the Nobel Prize. It is hard to know why. The old gentlemen of Stockholm who award the prize have a way of bypassing big and/or distinguished names in favor of astounding alternatives. But not since Icelander Halldor Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata.

After the startled press made hurried inquiries, the world learned that the winner had turned out an impressive body of work, was in his 60s, revered by his countrymen and active in the P.E.N. Club. It was all very predictable as Nobel prizewinners go. But The Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata's first U.S. publication since the award, leaves the reader ambivalent: the prize-givers have not made fools of themselves, but there i is little reason for special jubilation at their choice.

Kawabata's stylistic signature is the stringing together of minute episodes linked by association. Brilliant sunflower heads remind an old man that his own mind is fading. A girl's failure to notice new buds on a gingko tree is the first sign that she is deeply troubled. The plot moves as imperceptibly as the earth. It concerns a year in the lives of the Ogata family, particularly Shingo, the head of the household. At 62, he feels old and vaguely discontented. The light in his life comes from his new daughter-in-law Kikuko, and he is constantly made despondent by the fact that her husband is already carrying on a public affair.

Life in Miniature. He is equally depressed when his daughter's marriage collapses and she comes home with her two irritating children. Shingo is obsessed with beauty, but both his wife and daughter are ugly. He is left with the gingko tree, the sunflowers and Kikuko for comfort.

The first event of any consequence occurs--offstage--on page 167, and thereafter the book drifts to an uneasy solution. The pace is probably too slow for most Western readers. Yet for those who persevere, there is a reward. Though the story is seen through Shingo's eyes, Kawabata succeeds to an extraordinary degree in presenting the events as they must seem to other characters as well. The same conflicts are dramatized differently in several scenes. Voices echo and re-echo as tension and release are reflected in household rituals. In his fragile miniature of life, Kawabata has managed to present as many enigmas as Rashomon without shifting attention from the old man.

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