The Storytelling Image and the Ages of a Character: Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain (山の音・Yama no oto, 1949-1954)

The present study aims to analyse the novel  The Sound of the Mountain         (山の音・Yama no oto, 1949-1954), by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), beginning with a storytelling image, or an image that automatically produces a story. The image under scrutiny is auditory, an image of a mysterious, strongly affective intimacy, which sets the narrative tone and generates the function of the unreal (in the sense that follows Bachelard’s view) and, implicitly, of the imagination (which truly  stimulates the psyche), in an obvious opposition with the function of the real. By regarding the Japanese novel as an internal narration with a “limited” viewpoint, given by the actorial narrative type, since the centre for orientation coincides with the narrative perspective of an actor playing the role of a nucleus-character with a dynamic psychology, the present paper aims to explain, from a poetic and hermeneutic perspective, the meaning of the text beginning from the surface level that hides another view beneath. Moreover, in the case of the Japanese writer in question, the study highlights the search for the appropriate linguistic expression meant to depict the dual appearance of the perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas that are, on the one hand, clear, precise, but impersonal and, on the other hand, confused, mobile and inexpressible, revealing the means by which Kawabata sometimes tries to extract the abstract from the concreteness of words, in order to give them a purer meaning. Furthermore, by contextualising within the field of Kawabata’s literature, the  narrative plot of the novel The Sound of the Mountain, which is seemingly devoid of intrigue, climax and denouement, I outlined a narrative technique that I would call a linked novel, an architectonic construction that covers Yasunari Kawabata’s entire literary creation, through which the author simultaneously reveals and hides himself, while offering reading and interpretation keys for his works.

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