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

thought you wouldn’t be here yet.’
    Suzumoto hung up his hat. Tanizaki came up in some haste to take his coat, but he sat down without removing it. His bald head seemed comical to Shingo. The discoloration of age was to be seen above his ears. The aged skin was muddy.
    ‘What brings you here so early?’ Restraining a laugh, Shingo looked at his own hands. A faint discoloration would appear from the back of his hand down over the wrist, and then go away again.
    ‘Mizuta. He had such a pleasant death.’
    ‘Ah, yes, Mizuta.’ Shingo remembered. ‘They sent gyokuro after the funeral, and I got into the habit of drinking it again. Very good it was, too.’
    ‘I don’t know about the gyokuro , but I envy him the way he died. I’ve heard about such things. But Mizuta of all people.’
    Shingo snorted.
    ‘Don’t you envy him?’
    ‘You’re bald and fat, and there’s hope for you.’
    ‘But I don’t have all that much blood pressure. I’ve been told that Mizuta was so afraid of a stroke that he refused to spend a night alone.’
    Mizuta had died in a hot-spring hotel. At the funeral his old friends whispered of what Suzumoto called his pleasant death. It seemed a little strange afterwards to have concluded that, by virtue of the fact that he had had a young woman with him, it had been such a death. They were curious to know whether the woman might be at the funeral. There were those who said that she would carry unpleasant memories through her life, and those who said that, if she loved him, she would be grateful for what had happened.
    To Shingo, the fact that because they were university classmates these men in their sixties should toss out student jargon seemed another of the ugly marks of old age. They still addressed one another by the nicknames and affectionate diminutives of their student days. They had known all about one another when they were young, and the knowledge brought intimacy and nostalgia; but the moss-grown shell of the ego resented it. The death of Mizuta, who had made a joke of Toriyama’s death, had now become a joke.
    Suzumoto had insisted, at the funeral, upon speaking of the pleasant death; but the thought of it brought a wave of revulsion over Shingo.
    ‘It’s not very good form for an old man,’ he said.
    ‘No. We don’t even dream of women anymore.’ Suzumoto’s tone too was dispassionate.
    ‘Have you ever climbed Fuji?’
    ‘Fuji?’ Suzumoto seemed puzzled. ‘Why Fuji? No, I haven’t. Why do you ask?’
    ‘Neither have I. I am an aged man, and I have not yet climbed Mount Fuji.’
    ‘What? Is that some sort of dirty joke?’
    Shingo let out a guffaw.
    At work over an abacus near the door, Eiko snickered.
    ‘When you think about it, there must be a surprising number of people who go to their graves without climbing Fuji or seeing the three great sights. What percentage of Japanese do you suppose climb Fuji?’
    ‘Not one percent, I’d say.’ Suzumoto returned to the earlier subject. ‘I doubt if one person in tens of thousands, in hundreds of thousands, has the good luck of Mizuta.’
    ‘He won a lottery? But it must not be pleasant for his family.’
    ‘Yes, the family. As a matter of fact his wife came,’ said Suzumoto, with an air as of entering upon his real business, ‘and asked me about this.’ He put a clothwrapped parcel on the table. ‘Masks. No masks. She asked me to buy them. I thought I’d ask you to look them over.’
    ‘I know nothing about masks. They’re like the three great sights. I know they’re in Japan, but I’ve never been to see them.’
    There were two boxes. Suzumoto took the masks from their pouches.
    ‘This one is the jido mask, I’m told, and this the kasshiki. They’re both children.’
    ‘This one is a child?’ Shingo took up the kasshiki mask by the paper cord that passed from ear to ear.
    ‘It has hair painted on it. See? In the shape of a gingko leaf. That’s the mark of a boy who hasn’t come of age. And there are