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

that Teru was behaving very strangely, going around and around the tool-shed and pawing at the ground. She was looking for a place to have puppies. I imagine if we had put out straw she would have had them in the shed.’
    ‘They’ll be one fine problem when they grow up,’ said Shuichi.
    Shingo was pleased that Teru had had her puppies here; but the unpleasant thought also came to him of the day when, unable otherwise to dispose of mongrel puppies, they would have to abandon them.
    ‘I’m told that Teru had puppies here,’ said Yasuko.
    ‘So I’m told.’
    ‘I’m told that she had them under the maid’s room. The only room in the house with no one in it. Teru thought things out nicely.’
    Still in the kotatsu, Yasuko frowned slightly as she looked up at Shingo.
    Shingo too got into the kotatsu. When he had had his cup of tea, he said to Shuichi: ‘What happened to the maid Tanizaki was to get for us?’ He poured a second cup.
    ‘That’s an ashtray, Father.’
    He had poured his second cup into the ashtray.

2
    ‘I am an aged man, and I have not yet climbed Mount Fuji.’ Shingo was in his office.
    They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
    Last night he had dreamed of Matsushima Bay and its islands. That was perhaps why the words had come to him.
    This morning it had seemed odd to him that he should have dreamed of Matsushima, since he had never been there.
    And it occurred to him that at his age he had been to only one of the ‘three great sights of Japan’. He had seen neither Matsushima nor the strand at Amanohashidate. Once, on his return from a business trip to Kyushu, he had had a look at the Miyajima Shrine. It had been winter, not the proper season.
    In the morning, he could remember only fragments of the dream; but the color of the pines on the islands and of the water remained clear and fresh, and he was certain that the dream had been of Matsushima.
    On a grassy meadow in the shade of the pines, he had a woman in his arms. They were hiding, in fear. They seemed to have left their companions. The woman was very young, a mere girl. He did not know how old he himself was. He must have been young, however, to judge from the vigor with which they ran among the pines. He did not seem to feel a difference in their ages as he held her in his arms. He embraced her as a young man would. Yet he did not think of himself as rejuvenated, nor did it seem to be a dream of long ago. It was as if, at sixty-two, he were still in his twenties. In that fact lay the strangeness.
    The motorboat in which they had come went off across the sea. A woman stood in the boat, waving and waving her handkerchief. The white handkerchief against the sea was vivid in his mind even after he woke. The two were left alone on the island, but there was none of the apprehension that they should have felt. He just told himself that they could see the boat out at sea, and that their hiding place would not be discovered.
    Watching the white of the handkerchief, he woke.
    He did not know, after he woke, who the woman had been. He could remember neither face nor figure. Nor did any tactile impression remain. Only the colors of the landscape were clear. He knew neither why he was sure that it had been Matsushima nor why he should have dreamed of Matsushima.
    He had not been to Matsushima, nor had he crossed by boat to an uninhabited island.
    He thought of asking someone in the house whether to see colors in a dream was a sign of nervous exhaustion, but in the end remained silent. He did not find it pleasing to think that he had dreamed of embracing a woman. It seemed altogether reasonable that, at his present age, he should have been his young self.
    The contradiction was somehow a comfort to him.
    He felt that the strangeness would vanish were he to know who the woman was. As he sat smoking, there was a tap on the door.
    ‘Good morning.’
    Suzumoto came in. ‘I