The Sound of the Mountain

Kamakura, the old seaside capital, where one sleepless night the aging Shingo Ogata hears a deep sound from the wooded hills behind his house and takes it for a summons. He commutes to a Tokyo office along the line north, so the map runs from the temple town to the gardens of the capital.

Shingo Ogata

The Ogata house, Hase, Kamakura

The Ogata family share a house in Kamakura, and it is here, on a sleepless August night, that the aging Shingo hears a low rumble from the hills behind the house and reads it as a warning of his own death. Kawabata leaves the house unnamed and wrote the book while living a few streets away in Hase, so we anchor it there.

Opening section, the sound in the hills

inspired by The house is fictional and unnamed. We site it in Hase, beside Kawabata's own former Kamakura residence at 1-12-5 Hase, whose domestic world and wooded backdrop the novel closely reflects.

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