SOURCE: "The Twilight Years, East and West: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain," in Explorations, edited by Makoto Ueda, University Press of America, 1986, pp. 87-99.

[In the following essay, Tsuruta compares and contrasts the journeys undertaken by the aging main characters of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain.]

If anyone were to think of comparing Hemingway with a Japanese writer, the first name to come to mind would most likely be that of Mishima Yukio. The two writers share a wide area of common ground: an intense concern with masculinity, an obsession with violence and death, a strong, colorful personality which often overshadowed their literary work, and finally the fact that both ended their lives in violent suicide. On the other hand, Kawabata Yasunari, who tried to assuage loneliness with the beauty of art, women and nature, seems to offer little basis for comparison with the American novelist. Nevertheless, I have chosen Mishima's mentor here with the hope that this very contrast will shed some light on the workings of one modern Eastern mind against one Western mind in the face of a similar crisis.

Although it has no direct bearing on the actual comparison of these authors' works, it is intriguing to note that both Hemingway and Kawabata were born in 1899, both were the sons of doctors, both were awarded the Nobel Prize, and both committed suicide. Literary parallels exist also: both writers are known as superb stylists who abhorred abstraction, though their styles are quite different in texture; both writers' works explore the meanings of man's isolation; and finally, more than any other writer in their respective countries, each represents the sensitivities of his own cultural tradition at its deepest. When we compare The Old Man and the Sea and The Sound of the Mountain, we also realize that, even though the two writers were so different in temperament, they dealt with a surprisingly similar theme in their last important novels. Both works present a hero at the penultimate stage of his life struggling to live out his final days in the fullest way he knows. Both novels, considered by many critics to be the best works of their respective authors, have a deceptively simple style which hides a web of complex meanings.

Hemingway's novel starts: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream." The reader is not told the exact age of the Cuban fisherman but that he is "thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck." After eighty-four unlucky fishless days, Santiago rows far out into the Gulf Stream to hook a giant marlin of over fifteen hundred pounds, but sharks reduce the big fish to a skeleton by the time Santiago returns to shore. During the ordeal, Hemingway's hero displays an impressive mastery of skill and an almost superhuman energy and endurance. Kawabata's hero, on the other hand, is hardly that heroic. Shingo, a sixty-one-year-old businessman, thinks one night that he has heard the mountain in back of his house mysteriously make a sound. He vaguely interprets this occurrence as the beckoning knell of his death. During the fifteen months that follow, Shingo resorts to several ingenious devices to reverse time's flow. However he gradually comes to accept that he cannot be eternal; indeed, he is a part of that nature which keeps on living through a cycle of birth and death.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the way these two old heroes confront death by examining their responses to primarily two major factors in life: space and time. The Old Main and the Sea operates very much like The Sound of the Mountain in three distinct spaces: the sea, the land (that is, Cuba) and Africa. The sea is obviously the novel's main stage where a battle between man and nature is waged. A man is alone here on the vast ocean and must prove his worth against his adversary. Here also diurnal time ticks away, and a minimum of time-stopping fantasy is tolerated. The overall effect is that a man becomes a sharply outlined individual and seeks an infinite expansion of his ego.

The land is where Santiago is with people. He is with Martin, the owner of the restaurant—significantly named the Terrace—who gives the old man food; Perico, who looks after his skiff; and above all, his youthful admirer Manolin, who fetches him food and drink, listens to his stories and puts him to bed. It is on the land that the old man allows himself to rest, to sleep and to dream about Africa, a place he visited in his youth. The land locale appears only twice: at the beginning and at the end quite briefly, but it undoubtedly provides a contrast to the sea. Africa is not an actual space in this novel but reveals itself nearly every time the old man dreams. When he was Manolin's age, he was on a ship that sailed to Africa; while there, he saw lions on the beach. And in his dreams every evening he sees those same African lions. If the sea represents the present where time definitely flows, Africa suggests the past, where the old man's time has been frozen. In his dream, Africa does not change; it is constant. It is always there unchanged when the old man goes to sleep. Africa represents his eternal youth. The land, however, is somewhere in between the present and the past. It is a half-awake reality as opposed to the stark naked reality of the sea where every second counts. The old man is well cared for here and is a part of the locale. Not as frightening or as beautiful as the sea, the village is a place for inactivity.

Space in The Sound of the Mountain is similarly divided into three distinct places: Tokyo, where Shingo works, Kamakura where he lives, and finally Shinshu where he lived in his youth and about which he dreams. Tokyo is equivalent to Santiago's sea in that it is the place of his livelihood and in that it represents the harshest reality. This is where his old classmates are dying one by one, reminding him that time is running out. Tokyo is where Kikuko, his graceful daughter-in-law, and her friend have abortions and where Shingo takes it upon himself to counsel his son's girlfriend, Kinu, to have an abortion.

If Tokyo represents life-struggle and responsibility, Kamakura imparts more of a sense of harmony. Kamakura affords a glimpse of an unattended natural order, provides contact with various aesthetic objects and is where Kikuko, who functions somewhat like Manolin in The Old Man and the Sea, is. In Kamakura Shingo exerts himself at self-rejuvenation, but it is not the Garden of Paradise. It has its share of failed responsibilities and of disappointments for Shingo. At best, Kamakura is a half-way place. The real paradise for Shingo is Shinshu, except that it is a lost one. Shingo apparently grew up there and fell in love with his wife's beautiful sister, who later died. In Shingo's mind, the image of the sister is frozen with the background of u. He constantly reminisces about u and the sister, and once in his dream, he goes back there to see her.

As with Santiago's three spatial locales, each with its corresponding period of time, Shingo's Tokyo represents the present, u the past, and Kamakura a mixture of the present and the past. One of the differences between the two heroes in terms of space is that while for Santiago the main stage is the sea, which represents the present, for Shingo the main stage is not Tokyo but Kamakura, the half-way place between the present and the past. The significance of this difference will be clear when we analyze the two heroes' attitudes toward and actual dealings with time.

We must stress that both men face a crisis of old age which may be somewhat different in appearance though essentially the same in nature. Both realize that they are in the penultimate stage of life and that, mentally as well as physically, their strength is waning. At the outset of the novel, Santiago is referred to as salao, which is in Spanish the worst form of unlucky, because the old man has not caught a fish for eighty-four days straight. Shingo's power of memory is weakening; he forgets things easily, and so on. Then one night he hears the ominous sound of the mountain and realizes that he may not have much time left in life. Santiago's crisis takes a much more dramatic form: an eighteen-foot marlin whose conquest demands great skill, enormous energy and an iron will bordering on the superhuman. Shingo's crisis is more internal but just as real; to cope with it he must reach down very deep inside to tap his inner resources.

During the four days of his fight with the giant fish and with the sharks afterwards, Santiago does everything to restore his youthful energy—not just to stay alive but also to triumph over the fish. He uses for this purpose the young boy Manolin, nature, his baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, his fishing skills, his memory of the glorious past, his capacity for psychological self-splitting, and finally the dream of Africa. Surprisingly, the Japanese hero so different in occupation, temperament, social position and cultural reflexes, employs almost exactly the same methods to reverse his time flow. Following are item-by-item comparisons of the two old men's struggles against their eventual extinction.

Manolin means several things to Santiago. First of all, the boy understands and appreciates the old man in a way nobody else does. While no one else believes in Santiago, Manolin knows he is the best fisherman. Between them is what appears to be a private ritual: the old man tells the boy that he has a pot of yellow rice with fish and also a cast net. He knows that the boy in fact knows Santiago does not have these things, but the boy respects and goes along with the old man's fiction. The ritual confirms their bond. The old man can rely on the boy without losing his pride. Manolin is not only the food-bearer and the keeper of the old man, but he also represents the old fisherman's future: the boy, always eager to learn fishing skills from his senior, is Santiago's successor. Manolin will carry on where the old man leaves off. Thus on one level Manolin is the youthful double of Santiago, a future extension of him. But Manolin also reminds Santiago of his past. "When I was your age I was before the mast on a square-rigged ship that ran to Africa," Santiago says. Thus when the old man, struggling with the big fish, says aloud to himself, "I wish I had the boy" or "I wish the boy was here," he is invoking a youthful energy through an overlay of himself, both in past and future form, with the young boy.

Kikuko, the delicate daughter-in-law in The Sound of the Mountain, functions very much the way Manolin does. She is the water-bearer to Shingo and also the one who looks after him. Shingo dislikes meals and tea not prepared by Kikuko. Special areas exist which only Shingo and his daughter-in-law can understand and communicate, such as nature, art and death. She is an important link to his past, for she conjures up the vision of his wife's beautiful sister. At the same time, in Shingo's mind Kikuko also represents the future in that she may hopefully give birth to a child who is a reincarnation of the beautiful sister. This double function in regard to both the past and the future tends to diminish Kikuko's role in the present. Thus she remains, except towards the end of the novel, not a fleshed-out woman to whom one can relate but essentially a medium for Shingo's secret desires. Kikuko stirs the smouldering sexual emotions in Shingo but ultimately does not direct them to herself. Rather, she serves as a vehicle that carries him back to the beautiful sister of his fantasies and dreams.

Nature plays a vital part in both heroes' struggles to ride out their respective crises. Younger fishermen speak of the sea as el mar, which is masculine—thinking of it as a contestant or an enemy—but the old man calls it la mar. To him, the sea is a woman who gives and withholds great favors. If she does wicked things, it is because she cannot help it. The old man knows the sea thoroughly: its currents, winds, birds and fish. Nothing about the sea can surprise him. He can tell a hurricane is coming days ahead of time. The sea with its tuna, flying fish and shrimps nourishes and rejuvenates him, and with its salt water heals the wounds on his hands.

The old man has something of the sea about him. We are told at the outset, "Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated." Perhaps because of this rapport with the sea, the old fisherman begins to identify himself with the giant marlin he has hooked. The fish undergoes several stages of metamorphosis in Santiago's mind. It starts out as something of an adversary, then turns into something that demands a great deal of the old man's respect. A little later Santiago begins to address the fish as "brother." After he sees the fish jump out of the water, it becomes "beautiful" and "noble." But it is the shark attack that firmly establishes Santiago's identity with the fish. "When the fish had been hit, it was as though he himself were hit." This process becomes finalized when the old man eats a piece of the flesh of the great marlin. When sharks strip the big fish to the skeleton, Santiago is also being reduced to the bone. But he knew all along that he had gone too far out, that the sharks would come and that this would happen. Nature gives and also takes. There is no surprise in nature for Santiago for he is part of it.

Nature is full of surprises for the aged Japanese hero: the mountain sounds the knell of death, an old ginkgo tree puts forth young shoots in autumn, cherry trees bloom in the middle of winter, and a two-thousand year-old lotus seed comes into flower. To Shingo, in the beginning, nature is a mysterious entity which hides far more than it reveals. Shingo does not act upon nature but merely observes it. Yet through a keen power of observation he looks for and finds in nature phenomena which seem to defy the flow of time. Frightened by his approaching death, Shingo initially looks to nature for the assurance of a miracle that would show that time can be reversed. Thus the old gingko tree putting forth young leaves out of season seems to tell Shingo what he would like to hear. His observation of nature, however, gradually leads him away from his search for miracles, and to the discovery that things in nature flourish and decay but come back again in a renewed form. It dawns on him that although this year's kite that circles over his house may not be the same as last year's, it may in fact be last year's offspring. In the end, Shingo compares himself, without bitterness but not without a ring of sadness, with a descending trout, as mentioned in a haiku. He is aware now that the trout has laid its eggs upstream.

Joe DiMaggio is the old fisherman's hero not only because he is the best ballplayer but also because he performs perfectly, even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. The old man feels that he himself must become worthy of the great DiMaggio; he wonders if DiMaggio could endure his—the old man's—pain. Thus by directly comparing himself with his hero, Santiago whips up his own courage to continue the fight.

In one of his weakest moments, Shingo resorts to a similar method, though somewhat more obliquely. He discovers through a dream that he secretly harbors a sexual fantasy in regard to his daughter-in-law. Feeling depressed, Shingo remembers having seen a picture of a lone crow enduring a rainstorm at dawn, by the celebrated Edo artist Watanabe Kazan. Shingo saw the picture at a friend's house and was told that the friend looked at the crow in the picture during the War and thereby tried to endure the hard times. The suggestion here is that Shingo derives some strength by linking himself with the artist Kazan, who underwent personal ordeals, and also with the crow patiently awaiting daybreak.

The old hero of Hemingway's last novel is a skillful, experienced fisherman. The fisherman says, "It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready." To be skillful and to be exact with fishing is what helps him to survive and eventually hook the big fish. Skill means one's control of time. With skill, the old man is able to anticipate events which will occur. On the eighty-fifth day, he looks at the current and predicts that the day will be good for fishing. Later he knows that if the marlin turns east with the current, it is tiring; he can also foretell when the fish will jump clear of the water by looking at the slant of the line. Again, the old fisherman can sense when the fish is going to circle the boat. He knows that sharks will be after him and when that happens, "God pity him and me." Skill comes also from repeated experiences and affords a man control over flowing and otherwise capricious time by equipping him with the power of prediction. Hence time under the control of skill is cyclic, like the hands of a clock. Manolin the boy says to the old man, "You are my alarm clock." To this statement the old man replies, "Age is my alarm clock." When the old man himself is the alarm clock, there is very little harm for him in the sequence of things that are to happen.

If the Cuban fisherman has a cyclic clock inside him and seems to go along with the flow of time without protest, the Japanese hero is terrified at the prospect of reaching the terminal point of linear time. One of the ways he tries to arrest the flow of this time is through art. An artist can scoop up human feelings out of the swiftly moving river of time and crystallize them into a time-defying form like a painting or a poem. Shingo is surrounded by many forms of art. As Santiago is a practitioner of skill, Shingo is an observer. The Japanese hero appreciates art deeply and tends to move from life towards art: Eiko reminds him of an erotic print by Harunobu, and a stumbling puppy calls to mind a painting by Sotatsu. Shingo's effort to stop time through art comes to its climax when he overlays on Kikuko's face a jido mask, an unmistakable symbol of eternity. This act turns into a critical moment when Shingo comes to the threshold of having a glimpse of eternity. But toward the end, his faith in art is slowly undermined: he finds that the calligraphy by Ryokan is a fake. He also discovers that a famous tanka of Yosano Akiko carved in a stone monument contains an error. A Buson haiku comes to mind when Shingo tries to brush away the dark thoughts about Kikuko revealed in one of his dreams. The haiku goes: "I try to forget this senile love: a chilly autumn shower." In this case, art, instead of reversing time, nudges Shingo toward the stream of time and makes him realize the hopelessness of love. Thus art in Shingo begins as a time-arresting device, but it gradually disintegrates and finally ends up being a reminder of flowing time.

One of Santiago's extremely effective ways of gathering up courage to face his crises is to recall his younger days when he was physically much stronger. The old fisherman remembers how he once played the hand game with the strongest negro on the block. He recalls how they played one day and one night until blood oozed from under the fingernails of his hand, and until he finally won the game. The old man remembers that everyone called him the Champion. The memories of his glorious past renews Santiago's confidence.

The memories of the past are equally important in Shingo's rejuvenation process. While he easily forgets things of a few days ago, his memory of Yasuko's beautiful sister from about four decades ago is unbelievably vivid. Whenever life is felt to be too hard, Shingo evokes the sister's memory. Again, towards the end of the novel Shingo resorts less and less to memories of the past, until at the very end his memories are not so much about the sister the person but about u the place, and about haiku which she taught him. One such haiku reads: "A trout in the autumn, abandoning itself to the water." The haiku shows that Shingo has not only embraced his old age but also that he, having stopped fighting against the flow of time, goes down the stream like an old trout. Again, like the other time-stopping devices, his remembrance of the past gradually loses its effectiveness in the end, leading the hero to come to terms with himself.

Fighting the gigantic marlin, Santiago must mobilize every part of his body if he is to win. Suddenly his left hand becomes cramped. The old man resorts to a fascinating technique to regain the use of his left hand. He first distances himself from his hand and talks to it as if it were an independent entity completely separate from him. He curses, sweet-talks, encourages and commands the cramped hand. Finally, he is able to regain the use of it. But at another crucial time when the fisherman must sink his harpoon into the marlin's heart, his head goes numb. Thereupon he disassociates himself from his own head and treats it as if it did not belong to him. He says, "Clear up, head." In a crisis, then, Santiago psychologically dismembers a malfunctioning part of his body and tells it to shape up. Apparently this self-splitting method works for him.

Shingo does not go that far, but characteristically only fantasizes self-splitting. As he is looking at gigantic sunflowers one day, his beautiful daughter-in-law comes along and joins him. Shingo is reminded by the flowers of a virile male symbol, but he chooses to talk to her about a man's head instead:

My head hasn't been very clear these last few days. I suppose that's why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be a clean as they are. I was thinking on the train—if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off—well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. "Do this up for me, please," you'd say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming.

It is in dreaming that Shingo gets his wish—not having his head cleaned, but his secret wish underneath his sunflower/man's head talk: rejuvenation of his male virility. In the seventh dream, he is a young army officer who, carrying three pistols and an heirloom sword, goes to u to meet the object of his passion, his wife's sister.

Dreams have been thoroughly exploited for various literary purposes by a good number of novelists in the past. In the two novels under consideration, dreams are accorded a vital role. The reader is told that every night Santiago dreams about the golden beach of Africa where lions come out and play. After hooking the giant marlin, the old fisherman keeps up with the fish for two days without any sleep and knows that he must get some sleep soon if he is to win the fight. Santiago manages to doze off for a while and dreams. His dream is really a series of three short dreams: he sees a school of porpoises in their mating time leaping high into the air, then himself at the village on his bed, and finally the lions on the African beach. It is interesting to note that what he has dreamed will all come true. The big fish will jump out of the water, and with it Santiago's identity with it will be intensified. Then later he will be back in his village on his bed, dreaming of the lions. The dream function seems to be two-fold for Santiago: besides predicting events that will occur, it energizes the old man by taking him back to his boyhood and putting him in contact with the king of beasts.

The dreams in The Sound of the Mountain are probably the most important method by which Shingo achieves what he achieved at the end. His dreams, eight in all, are definitely designed so that he will undergo, dream by dream, a complete reversal of time until, toward the end, he is the young army officer with the heirloom sword going back to u to see the beautiful sister. Shingo uses his dreams as a time-tunnel leading into the past and fulfilling his fantasy, which can in no way be realized in actuality. It is precisely because Shingo has been able to visit his Garden of Paradise in his dreams that he is prepared to relieve Kikuko of her role as medium and also to embrace the circular concept of time as found in the four seasons of nature. The Garden of Paradise, Shingo discovers in his dream, is also the netherland and the terminal point in the linear time of which he has been so afraid. Thus in Shingo's case, dreams are given the function of ending his unfulfilled love affair with the dead woman by putting him in touch with her through their time-tunnel. With the very cause of his unhappiness dislodged in his past, he can now liberate himself from the clutch of linear time and gladly identify himself with a descending trout.

Santiago is Hemingway's idealized hero, a fearless fighter endowed with the wisdom of an old man, the unbounded energy of a youth and a characteristic capacity to endure pain. He is conscious of death neither in the beginning nor in the end. Every drop of his energy is concentrated on the present moment at sea, and his objective is to win the fight. He catches the fish only to lose it to the sharks, but little has changed inside this hero, or so it seems at least. He goes back to the same dream and may be out again to sea the next day. looking for another big fish to match the size of his ego. Santiago's identification with nature is highly selective. The sea is, after all, a woman; and a Hemingway man would not be caught dead completely merging with her. Santiago's object of self-identification is a giant fish with a spear the size of a baseball bat. If he hides his fear of death in his fierce battle against the fish, we cannot detect the fear. If we could, he would not fare well as a good Hemingway hero.

If there is an idealization in the character of Shingo, it is certainly not to the point in using a parable-like style as in The Old Man and the Sea. Shingo comes through as very human with his fears and failures, with which we can identify. He is not alone on the vast ocean pursuing his prize, but in the midst of a tangled web of human relationships, both past and present. His fish is not somewhere in the harsh present reality of Tokyo, but in u, a place lost to the past. Nevertheless, Shingo somehow catches the fish. It is only a trout, tiny, old, descending and female. It has no spear, but then again, no sharks can take it away from him.