The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker Page B

stance suggested confusion.
    She went back to her desk, head bowed.
    A boy brought in three or four letters. Eiko put them on Shingo’s desk.
    ‘Another funeral,’ muttered Shingo. ‘Too many of them. Toriyama this time? At two this afternoon. I wonder what’s happened to that wife of his.’
    Used to the way he talked to himself, Eiko only looked at him.
    ‘I can’t go dancing tonight. There’s a funeral.’ His mouth slightly open, he was staring absently before him. ‘He was persecuted. She really tormented him when she was going through the change of life. She wouldn’t feed him. She really wouldn’t feed him. He would manage to have breakfast at home somehow, but she would get nothing at all ready for him. There would be food for the children, and he would have some of it when she wasn’t watching. He was so afraid of her that he couldn’t go home at night. Every night he would wander around or go to a movie or a variety show or something, and stay away until they were all safe in bed. The children all sided with her and helped persecute him.’
    ‘I wonder why.’
    ‘That’s the way it was. The change is a terrible thing.’
    Eiko seemed to think that she was being made fun of. ‘Might it have been his fault?’
    ‘He was important in the government, and then he joined a private firm. They’ve rented a temple for the funeral, so I suppose he did fairly well. He had only good habits when he was in the government.’
    ‘I suppose he took care of his family?’
    ‘Naturally.’
    ‘It’s not easy to understand.’
    ‘No, I don’t suppose it is. But there are plenty of fine gentlemen in their fifties and sixties who spend their nights wandering around because they’re afraid of their wives.’
    Shingo tried to remember Toriyama’s face, but it refused to come to him. They had not met in ten years.
    He wondered whether Toriyama had died at home.

4
    Shingo thought he might meet university classmates at the funeral. He stood by the temple gate after he had offered incense, but he saw no one he knew.
    There was no one his age at the funeral. Perhaps he had come too late.
    He looked inside. The line by the door of the main hall was beginning to break up and move away.
    The family seemed to be inside.
    The widow survived, as Shingo had supposed she would. The thin woman directly in front of the coffin would be she.
    She evidently dyed her hair, but had not dyed it in some time. It was white at the roots.
    He thought, as he bowed to her, that she had not been able to dye it because Toriyama’s long illness had kept her busy. But then as he turned to light incense before the coffin he felt like muttering to himself that a person could never be sure.
    As he had come up the stairs and paid his respects to the family, he had quite forgotten how the dead man had been persecuted; and then as he turned to pay his respects to the dead man, he remembered again. He was astonished at himself.
    Making his way out, he turned so as not to have to look at the widow.
    He had been startled not by the widow but by his own strange forgetfulness. He felt somehow repelled as he made his way back down the flagstone walk.
    And as he walked away, he felt as if forgetfulness and loss lay pressing against the nape of his neck.
    There were no longer many people who knew about Toriyama and his wife. Even though a few might survive, the relationship had been lost. It had been left to the wife, to remember as she pleased. There were no third parties to look back upon it intently.
    At a gathering of six or seven classmates, including Shingo, there had been no one to give it serious thought when Toriyama’s name came up. They only laughed. The man who mentioned it coated his remarks with derision and exaggeration.
    Two of the men at the gathering had died before Toriyama.
    It was now possible for Shingo to think that not even Toriyama and his wife had known why the wife had persecuted him, or why he had come to be