SOURCE: "Decoding the Beard: A Dream-Interpretation of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain," in The Comparatist, Vol. XVIII, May, 1994, pp. 129-49.

Apart from the Japanese sensibility and literary tradition woven into many of his works, Kawabata Yasunari eagerly absorbed new ideas and techniques from the West during the early stage of his career as a writer. For instance, it is well known that, together with his friend Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata was involved with the activities of Shin Kankakuha (Neosensualism or Neoperceptionism), a literary movement that tried to incorporate such avant-garde trends as cubism, dadaism, futurism, symbolism and expressionism into Japanese literature in 1920s. Kawabata was also greatly interested in surrealism and stream of consciousness. Psychoanalysis is not an exception. Although Jungian psychology has been well accepted in Japan, it is Freudian psychoanalysis which has made remarkable impacts, direct or indirect, on Japanese artists including Kawabata.

Suisho Genso [Crystal Fantasy], for example, has often been noted for its experimental use of the stream of consciousness to express the contour of the distressed mind of a childless married woman. In this early novella, Kawabata already shows his unmistakable interest in Freud by having his female protagonist mention the Austrian scholar's name twice along with such terms as "psychology," "psychologist" and "the death instinct." Nor is this an isolated instance of an interest in Freud. According to Kim Chae-Soo, through his early tentative use of Freudianism and the stream of consciousness, Kawabata established a mode of "internal narration" in which the author describes things through the "limited viewpoint" of only one character, and most of Kawabata's critically acclaimed novels such as Yukiguni [Snow Country], Senbazuru [Thousand Cranes] and Nemureru Bijo [The House of the Sleeping Beauties] are written in this way. Moreover, twenty years after Crystal Fantasy, the writer seems to have found a long-awaited opportunity to make extensive use of the psychoanalytical approach in Yama no Oto [The Sound of the Mountain].

In the case of The Sound of the Mountain, the story is almost entirely narrated from the viewpoint of the protagonist Ogata Shingo. While still retaining an active role as the head of a family at Kamakura and as an executive of a Tokyo company, this man over sixty has two fundamental problems which are related to each other—anxiety about his weakened sexuality and fear of impending death. He is keenly aware of the latter problem when his old friends die one after another a few years after World War II. The former problem is often repressed by his moral consciousness, because the object of his sexual interest is his daughter-in-law Kikuko who lives with his three-generational family.

Throughout the novel, Shingo has a number of dreams, most of which readily yield to Freudian dream-interpretation, suggesting a disguised, repressed incestuous desire. However, at least one of his dreams seems totally irrelevant to the psychological scheme which underlies the work: this is the dream of a man with an elaborate beard which conforms to American ethnic patterns. Always regarded as "naïve, uncomplicated," according to the text, this dream, unlike the other ones, has not attracted serious critical attention. At the same time, four of Shingo's dreams appear in two pairs on separate occasions. One pair of successive dreams in the second chapter is about Shingo's encounter with two of his dead acquaintances. The other pair of dreams, which includes the one about the extraordinary beard, happens much later at a moment of moral crisis. Apart from what each of these dreams might indicate, the significance of coupling itself has been little explored. When correlated with the overall meaning of the work, however, the nonsensical dream about the beard and the coupling of dreams also acquire a certain psychological significance.

Freudian psychoanalysis as presented in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–17) and Freud's other works are helpful here, because the protagonist makes good use of this popular approach in his attempts to understand the hidden messages of his dreams. Thus, our study is doubly comparative, first in exploring Kawabata's use of Freudianism in his novel, and subsequently in applying Freudian psychoanalysis to reveal the meanings of some of Shingo's dreams.

In order to develop the full implications of a Freudian interpretation of Shingo's dream about the beard, the protagonist's preoccupations with a death fear and sexual dysfunction will first be situated in relation to the arts, nature, and other people. Then, his dreams will be explored in order to extract the possible meanings of the double dreams and the dream of the beard. In dealing with the dream of the beard, the social background of occupied Japan and the role played by the United States will be examined, since the American presence at that time penetrated many aspects of people's lives, both real and fictional. In the end, these dreams will hopefully enhance our sense of the organic coherence of this novel, in spite of its loose sequence of chapters, which has created the misleading impression that its components are "assembled but unconnected," as Miyoshi Masao puts it, and are like "the stringing together of little vignettes with no great regard for over-all form," as Edward Seidensticker has argued.

The Sound of the Mountain is fraught with psychological symbolism. The title itself derives from an undefinable sound which Shingo hears on a quiet summer night at the beginning of the story:

He thought he could detect a dripping of dew from leaf to leaf.

Then he heard the sound of the mountain….

It was like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth…. He wanted to question himself, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether it had been the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, or a sound in his ears. But he had heard no such sound, he was sure. He had heard the mountain.

Somehow convinced of the reality of the eerie phenomenon, Shingo immediately associates the sound with his fear of death, since he feels with a chill "as if he had been notified that death was approaching." Remarkable here is the description suggestive of the unconscious from which a dream emerges, for there is "a vast depth to the moonlit night, stretching far on either side." While the primary sense is auditory with tense quietude intoning the sound of the mountain, the visual sense, which dominates our dream, introduces Kikuko with the unreality of her moonlit dress "hanging outside, unpleasantly gray," like an obtrusive, insubstantial dream image. This unpleasantness around Kikuko's first appearance should be regarded as a result of the unconscious, instantaneous negation of what Shingo might otherwise feel sexually attracted to. A moment later, he imagines this piece of clothing "sweat-soaked," thereby divulging his latent interest.

This entire nocturnal scene resembles a bad joke, which is characteristic of anxiety-dreams as Freud defined them. Moreover, Shingo remembers the discarded suicide plan he heard ten days earlier from a geisha. She intended to die with her lover, but, not sure of the effect of the potassium cyanide he brought, she changed her mind at the last moment. The sudden recollection of the planned love suicide, which also looks like a spoiled game, is reminiscent of dream formation, because this "strange memory" is taken at random from an everyday, unimportant occurrence and is forcibly associated, through the notion of death, with an unrelated, significant element. Although not an actual dream, this nocturnal scene distinguishes itself from a working of the conscious mind by its temporary, hallucinatory nature. Moriyasu Masafumi calls this scene "a reality transformed into another reality by a dream," and Takahashi Hideo considers it "a dream sphere." In this initial stage, we already notice the effect of Shingo's two obsessions, death and sexuality, in a Freudian framework.

A few days later, the sound of the mountain is traced back to the remote past in a conversation with Kikuko and his wife Yasuko. As Shingo tells them of his uncanny experience, Kikuko recalls that, according to her mother-in-law, Yasuko's beautiful sister had a similar experience just before her death in her twenties. This precedent, however, which took place a few decades before, had not come to Shingo's mind until his daughter-in-law mentioned it. Shingo as a young man loved Yasuko's elder sister. With his desire unfulfilled, he married Yasuko, hoping in vain that his offspring would inherit his sister-in-law's beauty through his wife. He is attracted to Kikuko partly because her "delicate figure made him think of Yasuko's sister." His attachment to his daughter-in-law is so perceptibly strong as to invite some criticism from the other family members.

Although Shingo is used to his own frequent forgetfulness of recent events, his failure to associate the two occurrences of the same phenomenon shocks him. In this case, we should rather suspect that the two instances of the sound, which originates in the death of someone dear to him, were unconsciously kept from being associated with each other in memory by his fear of death. The sound of the mountain as a foreboding of death is thus related to sexual desire still lingering from Shingo's younger days, and the sound turns out to be the psychological undertone of the novel, although he hears it only once.

The death knell actually sounds inside and around Shingo in far more tangible ways. His fitful senile amnesia, one typical instance of which opens the novel, is ironically a constant reminder of "a life … being lost," and makes him feel "a twinge of something like fear." Later in the last chapter, Shingo temporarily forgets how to tie a necktie, "a process he had repeated every morning through the forty years of his office career," and he fears that he might be facing "a collapse, a loss of self." As Jaime Fernández argues, his loss of memory is equated with the loss of life. And, one year before hearing the sound of the mountain, Shingo spits blood, presumably from his lungs. Although there has been no other symptom indicative of tuberculosis since then, "to spit blood at his age gave him the darkest forebodings." When he is shaken with emotion, he feels "the fatigue of his years" come "flooding over him."

At the same time, like the recurring tones of a reminding bell, Shingo hears of the deaths of friends from his university days. All of these reported deaths take place in autumn, which seems to be a corresponding metaphor for the age of Shingo and his generation. They are all far advanced in the penultimate season of life, and there is no turning back in time as they experience daily the steady approach of death. Moreover, a devastating storm called war has made the autumn of Shingo's generation far worse than usual:

His schoolmates were now in their sixties. Among them were considerable numbers whose luck, from the middle of the war on into the defeat, had not been good. Since they were already then in their late fifties, the fall was cruel and the recovery difficult. And they were of an age to lose sons in the war.

The "scar" left by the war, from which the title of the twelfth chapter is derived according to Ochi Haruo, often extends far into the psyche. Kitamoto, who was one of Shingo's friends from his school days and who died during the air raids, lost three sons and went insane when, having proven useless in his wartime company, he was forced to stay home. According to a friend who tells Shingo of Kitamoto's last years, he sat all day in front of a mirror, pulling out his white hairs in an effort to strive "against the years." Once his obsession "to be young again" had resulted in complete baldness, his resistance against time seemed to bring about "a miracle," for a "fine crop of black hair came out on his naked head." But he died shortly thereafter, since he apparently "used up all his energy growing that crop of dark hair."

In Shingo's case, although he does not lose his son in the war, he loses his virility and can not regain it. He knows that he is "not very old," but "[w]hat had been killed by the war had not come to life again" and "that was how it was with him." Lying down beside Yasuko at night, he no longer reaches out to touch his wife except when he tries to stop her snoring, which he takes as an "infinitely saddening" fact. Even when he has a chance with a young geisha in Tokyo, he does "nothing out of the ordinary" and resignedly accepts the idea that "in sex, too, there were riches and poverty, good luck and bad." Obviously, World War II profoundly affected the inner life of Shingo's generation in terms of both sexuality and a fear of death.

Shingo's existence is shaken because of "a fundamental sense of debility" in Ookubo Takaki's words, or of "the most inner aging" which enfeebles "the energy of life," as Iwata Mitsuko puts it. In this situation, although not as single-mindedly as the deranged Kitamoto, Shingo nevertheless feels an irresistible attraction to things which seem to resist, freeze, or reverse the flow of time—specifically, to certain works of arts and to certain objects in nature.

Shingo's fascination with the arts is easily understandable, for the arts freeze time within their creations and give us a sense of pseudoeternity, a motif Keats celebrated in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The list of artifacts which interest Shingo includes Noh masks, a Buddha statue, a filmed Kabuki play, a framed scroll of calligraphy, paintings by ancient masters, haiku and tanka poems, and a few lines from a Noh play. The most important object is a Noh mask called jido. Having been handed down from one generation to another for about four hundred years, and representing the seductive beauty of the opposite gender for Shingo, this mask of an early teenage male symbolizes "eternal youth." Shingo has one of the closest, emotional contacts with his daughter-in-law when she utters, through the mask which she has placed in front of her face, her hope of staying with him after her probable divorce. Putting it away in a closet on the day of purchase, Shingo avoids the sight of the jido mask that inadvertently discloses his latent desire for restored youth and sexuality.

Wild vegetation also tends to be endowed with symbolism peculiar to the workings of Shingo's mind. A large gingko tree behind Shingo's house, stripped bare of its leaves by a typhoon, sprouts new leaves in the fall. Partly because of his position at the dinner table, Shingo, not the observant Kikuko, first takes notice of this unseasonable phenomenon. The dialogue between the two on this occasion is telling:

"I've been thinking the ones that live long are different from the others. It must take a great deal of strength for an old tree like that to put out leaves in the fall."

"But there's something sad about them."

"I've been wondering whether they'd be as big as the leaves that came out in the spring, but they refuse to grow."

Besides being small, the leaves were scattered, too few to hide the branches. They seemed thin, and they were a pale yellowish color, insufficiently green.

It was as if the autumn sun fell on a gingko that was, after all, naked.

With their short promise of life, these new leaves anticipate the anecdote of Kitamoto's renewed black hair, and Shingo's close observation of the change in the gingko tree betrays his latent wish for rejuvenation. Shingo is also impressed by the strength of "a broken thistle," the stem of which still stands "fresh green," in the midst of winter (December the 29th).

His latent wish to get away from death by stopping time, and to have his life reinvigorated and renewed, manifests itself most clearly when he talks about staying buried in the ground "without dying" only to "wake up after fifty thousand years and find all your own problems … and the problems of the world" solved, which, he says, would put him "in paradise." This fantasy is induced by a newspaper article on the excavated lotus seeds that came to life with shoots and flowers after having stayed dormant for as long as fifty thousand years, or in Shingo's words, for "[a]lmost an eternity, when you compare it with a human life."

In some cases, plants are shown to have explicit sexual connotations. One afternoon during the same summer when he hears the sound of the mountain, Shingo finds himself with Kikuko gazing up at blooming sunflowers in front of a neighbor's house. Each of these plants has a flower "larger in circumference than a human head," and he is particularly impressed by "the strength of the great, heavy, flowering heads" and by the orderly arrangement of the stamens. According to Kobayashi Ichiro, Shingo's interest in these specific aspects of the sunflowers is analogically generated by his wish for a brain of "systematic reason or intelligence," including clear memory, which he feels he is losing with "futile searchings" in his old age. On this occasion, Shingo, who is confessedly "tired," tells Kikuko that his head "hasn't been very clear these last few days," and he wishes that his head "could be as clean as they [the sunflowers] are."

These sunflowers are highly suggestive of Freud's phallic symbolism. Not surprisingly, Shingo looks upon the flowers as a symbol of male sexuality, although the yellow petals around the stamens look feminine:

He felt the regularity and order with which they were put together. The petals were like crowns, and the greater part of the central discs was taken up by stamens, clusters of them, which seemed to thrust their way up by main strength. There was no suggestion that they were fighting one another, however. They were quietly systematic, and strength seemed to flow from them….

The power of nature within them made him think of a giant symbol of masculinity. He did not know whether they [stamens] were male or not, but somehow he thought them so.

Shingo rightly suspects that "it was Kikuko's coming that had set him to thinking strange thoughts." The admired sunflowers stand for what he is now losing, that is, clearheadedness and, more importantly, his sexual vigor. The fate of the sunflowers is highly suggestive of this psychic correlation, for all of them are later struck down in a typhoon:

Blossoms had lain in the street, broken off with six inches or so of stem. They had been there for several days, like severed human heads.

First the petals withered, and then the stems dried and turned dirty and gray.

The remaining, standing stems are left leafless by the gate. Shingo walks over the fallen flowers every day on his way to and from work. By trying to avoid the sight of the decaying plants, Shingo unconsciously identifies with the fate of the once vigorous sunflowers in terms both of his waning masculinity and his approaching death.

The question is how Shingo tries to cope with "something flickering inside" (my translation), "a flicker of youth," or "a flicker of something youthful" in himself, which he unconsciously has kept unquenched from his young days only to find its potential fulfillment in his daughter-in-law. He is vaguely aware that what he seeks in his daughter-in-law goes far beyond mere kindness. However, his moral consciousness cannot admit the full emergence of such a latent sentiment, because that would suggest incest. Even if he admitted to that sentiment and followed up on it, he would still have to face his weakened potency. On the other hand, he cannot do without this suppressed feeling, which now functions for him as an indispensable means of resisting eroding time and the fear of death. As Ochi and Kim argue, sex stands for life here. To deal with this dilemma, we as well as the protagonist have to understand his dreams through Freudian psychoanalysis.

In Shingo's dreams, his two major concerns of death and sexuality appear time and again in distorted forms. Before we begin our dream-interpretation, however, two points ought to be noted. First, according to Freud, the problem which discloses itself in a dream is fundamentally based on an unsolved problem in the dreamer's childhood. In The Sound of the Mountain, Shingo's problem of unfulfilled love stems, if not from childhood, then from a quite early stage in his life. In fact, Kawasaki Toshihiko infers from the fact that Shingo calls the house where he is finally reunited with Yasuko's sister-in-law in the seventh dream "his home" (my translation) that "Shingo was probably brought up as an orphan boy in the house of Yasuko and her sister (or at least in its vicinity)." Perceiving a projection of the orphan Kawabata in Shingo, Isogai Hideo assumes that Shingo did not have a home of his birth after all. Second, when he has physical contact with a woman in some of his dreams, which usually does not happen in Freud's examples, we should consider Shingo's age and experience. As a man over sixty, Shingo has a sense of morality which, while it does not restrict his dreams of direct sexual contact, is strong enough to prohibit him from enjoying unrestrained sexual fantasies involving his daughter-in-law.

Shingo is aware that he has many dreams in his old age, in spite of his basic hope to have a sound sleep of "no dreaming." The novel reports eight of his dreams and one of Yasuko's (excluding the one at the end of the sixth chapter ["The Cherry in the Winter"], in which Shingo only hears Yasuko's sister call his name). All of Shingo's dreams have some sexual connotation, and he has physical contact with young girls in three of them. In his waking consciousness, he cannot remember who those girls were. In his old age, Shingo seldom has obscene dreams, which makes him all the more curious about the identity of the dreamed girls.

In the first dream, for instance, which takes place at dawn on the same day he looks up at the impressive sunflowers, he finds himself in the house of a cabinetmaker whom he had occasionally employed but who has been dead for three years. The cabinetmaker has six daughters, whose faces Shingo does not remember. Still, it seems to Shingo that he slept with one of them in the dream and that he knew who she was when he momentarily woke up before resuming sleep. Yet, in the evening, he vainly tries to recall her identity, and is not even sure whether she was one of the cabinetmaker's daughters:

He remembered clearly having touched someone, but he had no notion who she might have been. He could remember nothing that even gave him a hint.

All that remains is a dull sensation with the awareness that she was a virgin, "a mere girl":

Not, of course, that it had been a sharp enough sensation to wake him.

Here, too, nothing definite of the dream remained. The figure had gone, and he could not bring it back; all that remained was a sense of physical disparity, a failure of physical contact.

This "certain sensual disappointment," which "reduced the sexual excitement almost to insipidity" (my translation), betrays his concern about the dwindling vigor of his life and sexuality. Most probably, the dream-work intervened to disguise the object of his latent desire. In fact, Shingo asks himself if it would not be "true to the laws of dreams" for him to have been "awakened at the shock of contact with the girl," although "the clearest image in his mind" upon waking up was "the noodles" offered by the cabinetmaker. He also wonders whether, "from feelings of guilt, he had managed to forget" who that girl was.

In a second dream, which follows immediately on the same night, he sees someone else who had died less than a year before. This time, it is Aida who had been a director of Shingo's company until about ten years before. In the dream, he visits Shingo at home. Although he did not drink alcohol in real life, Aida appears to have "drunk a good bit already" to the extent that the "pores on his red face were agape." Instead of "a medicine bottle" which he always used to carry around, he brings "a half-gallon bottle of sake in his hand." He is not emaciated, as he was near his death, but fat.

There are two points to be noted about this dream in relation to the preceding one. First, Shingo's strong concern with death is evident, in that both Aida and the cabinetmaker are dead. Shingo thinks, with half joking superstition, that these two men might have come to take him to their world. These two men, however, appear in the dreams "as living people." Moreover, Aida is endowed with perfect health, which he never had in reality. Second, a certain object has symbolical importance in each dream. Tsuruta Kinya thinks that the noodles of the first dream, which were "laid on bamboo, in a frame lacquered black on the outside and red on the inside," might stand for the female sexual organ, while the large bottle of sake in the second dream could symbolize the penis ("Jikan to Kukan"; "Yume no Kaishaku"). Moriyasu shares this view, in support of which Siegfried Scharschmidt finds a parallel between "the dreaming Shingo—the noodles—the young girl" and "Shingo in reality—meals—Kikuko." We may suspect again the strong intervention of the dream-work in substituting these symbols for sexual organs.

When two seemingly unrelated dreams occur successively, we as dream interpreters are supposed to provide the missing semantic conjunction, understanding that the mode of expression in dreams is regressive. In Freud's words, because "in the course of the dream-work all the relations between the dream-thoughts drop out" and result in the "picture-language" of manifest dreams, "it is the task of the interpretation to re-insert the omitted relations," such as "'because,' 'therefore,' however,' etc." In this case, the noodles, details of which he remembers most vividly at the very moment of awakening, pose a hard challenge to the dreaming Shingo. As a symbol of the female genitalia, they represent an object of desire which he has no confidence to deal with after his failed contact with the unidentified girl in the dream. To enjoy her, he has to regain his vitality, just as a patient recuperates from a very serious illness and gains exuberant health, or even as a dead person comes back to life. Therefore, the link to be semantically supplied between the two dreams is "because," and the hidden message can be summed up as follows: "because" he lacks the virility to handle the object of his desire, he has to be sexually invigorated beyond any probability. The large bottle, which Aida brings Shingo, thus represents what he ultimately wishes to obtain.

The motifs of an unidentified girl and a lack of sexual excitement persist in the next two dreams. In the third dream, a few months later in early winter, Shingo finds himself holding a girl in his arms on the grass under the pine trees of an island (hence the title of the fifth chapter, "A Dream of Islands"). He is not sure about his own age in the dream. Here we may observe a synthesis of contraries (youth and old age), which is one of the operations characteristic of dream formation:

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.

Yet, far from enjoying this adventure, he feels frightened and tries to hide himself. This is an instance of an anxiety-dream, in which the pleasure expected of a fulfilled, but forbidden wish is transmuted into distressful non-pleasure. And, once more, Shingo remembers "neither face nor figure" of the girl, although he does not forget that the woman was "very young, a mere girl." Even the sense of touch eludes him.

The situation remains largely the same in Shingo's fourth dream during the early spring of the following year, a dream about a girl in her mid-teens who "has become a holy child forever" after an abortion:

The girl must have had a name, and he must have seen her face, but only her size, or more properly her smallness, remained vaguely in his mind. She seemed to have been in Japanese dress.

Shingo thinks that it is not "a vision of Yasuko's beautiful sister." The evening before, he was shocked by a newspaper article reporting on the unexpectedly high rate of pregnancy of high school girls, which Shingo believes is the "source of the dream." The recurrent physical immaturity of the dreamed girls seems to be just another indication of Kawabata's partiality for young female virgins, as best exemplified by the student-protagonist who feels greatly relieved to find out that the girl he likes is "a mere child" in Izu no Odoriko [The Izu Dancer]. In The Sound of the Mountain, however, Shingo is often found to be attentively observing the smallest change of Kikuko's maturing body, in spite of a lack of conscious lasciviousness. By transforming the original shock of repugnance into "something beautiful," the dreaming self probably carried out the paradoxical wish of rendering the sexually initiated Kikuko virginally pure. Tachibana argues that this fleeting balance of virginity and sexuality poses the most desirable femininity for Kawabata. This is another instance of coalesced opposites, which is only possible in dreams. In any case, Shingo was "completely the onlooker" in this dream, without any direct sexual involvement. This distance removes all of his anxiety, in contrast to the foregoing dream where a decisive action uncharacteristic of the dreamer brings about a fear of punishment.

Another few months later, one night in the pre-summer rainy season, Shingo has two dreams again, the first of which is the dream about the unique beard:

It took place in America, where Shingo had never been….

In his dream, there were states in which the English were most numerous, and states in which the Spanish prevailed. Accordingly, each state had its own characteristic whiskers. He could not clearly remember, after he awoke, how the color and shape of the beards had differed, but in his dream he had clearly recognized differences in color, which is to say in racial origins, from state to state. In one state, the name of which he could not remember, there appeared a man who had gathered in his one person the special characteristics of all the states and origins. It was not that all the various whiskers were mixed in together on his chin. It was rather that the French variety would be set off from an Indian beard, each in its proper place. Varied tufts of whiskers, each for a different state and racial origin, hung in sprays from his chin.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.

Sometime before Shingo's dream, Kikuko returned to Kamakura after a few days spent at her parents' house in Tokyo in order to hide her embarrassment about her secret abortion, bringing a gift for every family member in Shingo's house. The present for her husband was "an American comb" while Shingo got "an electric razor of Japanese make." On the subsequent mornings, Shingo enjoys shaving "his own face clean" with the small device which was a rarity in those days. Waking up first from the dream of the long American beard that rainy night, he naturally ascribes the dream content to the new electric razor and comb, and considers the dream just "naïve, uncomplicated."

And then, falling asleep again, he has another dream which appears to have nothing to do with the foregoing one. This is the last of the three dreams in which Shingo makes physical contact with a girl. The lack of sexual excitement, which haunted his dubious encounter with the dreamed girls in the previous cases, defines the entire nature of this dream:

His hands were against drooping, vaguely pointed breasts. They remained soft, refusing to rise. The woman was refusing to respond. All very stupid.

At first, the image is no more than "two breasts floating in space," and then, it takes the shape of a woman. Characteristically, the dreamer is unable to recognize her. More precisely, it is "not so much that he did not know as that he did not seek to find out." But when Shingo asks himself in the dream who she is, he sees her assume the identity of the younger sister of a friend of his son. The recognition neither excites him nor vexes him with a sense of guilt. He considers her to have no experience with childbirth, and he is surprised to see "traces of her purity on his finger." Still, he does not feel particularly guilty, and he wakes up.

Interestingly, Shingo himself develops a highly Freudian psycho-analysis of this dream upon awakening. At first, he ascribes the insipid nature of the dream to his strong moral disapproval of adultery. Then, he remembers that, contrary to the dream, this specific girl has full breasts in reality. The fact that he dreamed about such a girl who has little to do with him appears to be perplexingly inexplicable. But, suddenly, he finds the relevance of the dream when he also remembers that, before Shuichi got married to Kikuko, there was some talk of arranging his marriage to this girl. The two young people kept company for a while. He now suspects that his superego intervened in the dream and replaced his daughter-in-law by the other girl to disguise his latent incestuous desire:

Had not moral considerations after all had their way even in his dream, had he not borrowed the figure of the girl as a substitute for Kikuko? And, to coat over the unpleasantness, to obscure the guilt, had he not made her a less attractive girl than she was?…

Even in the dream, had he sought to hide it, to deceive himself?… [T]hat he had given her an elusive, uncertain form—was it not because he feared in the extreme having the woman be Kikuko?

This reflection exhibits distinctly Freudian concepts, such as repression and displacement. Because of the intervention of the superego which does not permit any aberration from the dreamer's moral standard, the "subconscious wish" for a sexual relationship with Kikuko is "[s]uppressed and twisted" in the dream. The pleasure which might arise from the intercourse is denied in the dream. The woman with whom he unconsciously desires physical contact is replaced by a totally different individual with some "unlovable" disfigurement. Furthermore, the seemingly innocent words "All very stupid," which Shingo mutters in the dream, are indirectly related to Shingo's other psychological problem, death, because he remembers that they were the last words of a famous novelist (Mori Ogai) on his deathbed.

The relevance of this self-interpretation to the past dreams is evident. It explains the dull sensation devoid of sexual excitement, typically felt in the first dream. Shingo suspects that he latently wishes he could redesign his life and love "the virgin Kikuko, before she was married to Shuichi." This accounts for the persistent virginity of the dreamed girls, including the curiously mixed case of the fourth dream in which an abortion is turned into a purifying act of eternally preserving virginity. This analysis also accounts for the ambivalence of his age in the third dream, where the dreaming self is felt to be specifically "still in his twenties," that is, of his son's age. Shingo unconsciously wishes to embrace Kikuko by taking the place of Shuichi, at once without losing his self-identity as a man in his early sixties and without being troubled with his age-plagued sexuality. In the end, he realizes once and for all that his inability to identify the girl upon awakening and the obscurity of the dream's plot might have been caused because "at the moment of awakening, a certain cunning went adroitly to work at erasing the dream."

Upon discovering his naked desire for his daughter-in-law, Shingo immediately attempts to get over this moral crisis by having recourse to a conventional measure, that is, by rejecting this "evil dream" (my translation) as a fleeting vision that is meaningless, unreliable, and not founded on any fact. In order to reassure himself, he thinks of the dream about the beard, which he had experienced earlier that night, as a good example of a mere, senseless dream. He even tries to deny what he has found out with analytical reasoning, telling himself that he does not believe in "dream-interpretation" (my translation). However, in light of the uninterrupted continuation of the two dreams and the poignant complexity of the second dream, we should not dismiss the first dream about the monumental beard as just naïve and simple as Shingo tries to.

The image of America, to which the beard is inseparably linked, has to be examined before we can fully understand what the dream stands for. In spite of the scarcity of direct references to political situations, Kawabata was not totally indifferent to, nor unaffected by, social upheaval. Far from "completely precluding the air fraught with keen, strong, violent motion and tension" of "people's rough life," as Sugiura Akihira has argued, Kawabata rendered in some of his works the social and political situations around him as something more than "vaguely atmospheric" indexes of "intense reality." In The Sound of the Mountain, with the story set in the early years of post-WWII Japan when the loss of national sovereignty was a reality, there are several short but unmistakable references to the occupying forces and to their formidable weapons. For example, foreign military airplanes roar over Shingo's house in otherwise peaceful Kamakura, reminding the protagonist of his war-time experience of air raids:

Two American military planes flew low overhead. Startled by the noise, the baby [Kuniko, one of Shingo's granddaughters by his daughter Fusako] looked up at the mountain….

Shingo was touched by the gleam of surprise in the innocent eyes….

"I wish I had a picture of her eyes just now. With the shadow of the airplanes in it. And the next picture…."

Of a dead baby, shot from an airplane, he was about to say;…

In fact, there were numberless babies like Kuniko as he had seen her in the two pictures.

A few pages earlier, when he hears astoundedly from Shuichi about Kikuko's abortion, Shingo does not forget family privacy and, though on a train, he makes sure that the fellow passengers seated in front of them are indeed "two American soldiers" who probably do not understand their conversation in Japanese. As these instances demonstrate, Americans represented conspicuously the main forces of occupation in those days. With its overwhelming military presence, America stood for power in occupied Japan.

In The Sound of the Mountain, American power connotes more than sheer military might. The United States appeared to the war-devastated Japanese as a nation of affluence. The American luxuries include the "German pointer" which an American family takes for a walk in a park in central Tokyo and the latest fashion for which Shuichi's mistress, who is a dressmaker, reads "all sorts of American magazines." It is also the technologically advanced country to which the excavated ancient lotus seeds are sent to measure their age with "[c]arbon radiation tests." And wonderful things can happen there. A newspaper article, for example, reports that, thanks to the doctor's immediate grafting treatment, an accident-torn ear was successfully "stuck … back on" the original body in Buffalo, New York. Especially important are the two episodes of the lotus seeds and the torn ear, for they imply Shingo's concerns with the brevity and potential resuscitative power of human life. In a word, the United States is viewed as a place of economic, intellectual and miraculous power, not merely as an immense military warehouse. People's interest in such a land is also indicated by other passing references. Another newspaper article, which Shingo mentions to his new secretary, tells of a questionnaire distributed to one thousand secretaries, which "some sociologists at Harvard University and Boston University" had designed in order to learn what pleases them most. When Fusako utters Popeye's name in an emotion-fraught dinner at the beginning of chapter eleven ("A Garden in the Capital"), even her old mother perfectly understands this popular American symbol of diet-empowered masculinity.

On the other hand, the military aspect of American power is often tinged with sexual vigor. Shingo perceives this mixed symbolism in a foreign soldier whom he finds sitting in front of him one day on a train. The soldier appears to be about Shingo's age, but he possesses an energetic body which is far bigger than the meager counterpart of the ordinary Japanese. He has "a fierce countenance," a thick neck, and heavy arms which remind Shingo of "a shaggy red bear." Above all, he is accompanied by a Japanese boy who is apparently a male prostitute. Except for the hint of homosexuality, this kind of sight which betrays the powerful sexuality of the occupying troops constitutes a part of Shingo's everyday experience. In the first chapter ("The Sound of the Mountain"), he furtively observes two female prostitutes with "good figures" in a fish shop. One of these girls considers lobsters for her foreign customer, whom she calls her "boy friend." In the park of central Tokyo, Shingo notices not only the American couple with a German pointer but also a "white soldier" (my translation) who is "joking with a prostitute."

Similar instances are not too difficult to find in Kawabata's other novels written around the Occupation. In Hamachidori [Beach Plovers], which is an unfinished sequence to Thousand Cranes, the newly married protagonist watches together with his bride, from their honeymoon hotel, several American warships "loaded with the thirst of sexual desires" (my translation), coming to a town of hot springs for one night of pleasure. This makes an ironical contrast to the new husband who, with his mind disturbed by previous affairs, cannot consummate his marriage. Later at night, he watches the warships exhibit their deadly force in naval firing practice off the shore. In this case, the symbolism of male sexuality is obvious because of the thundering cannons. On the other hand, the General Headquarters offer the important background of a secret date that opens the story Maihime [The Dancer]. The austere GHQ building, at the top of which the U.S. and U.N. flags are visible in the daytime, and red lights flicker in the evening, seems to be another instance of the same symbolism. In Kawa no Aru Shitamachi no Hanashi [A Story of a Town with a River], the militarism of masculinity takes the form of direct action. A beautiful, timid girl, who has become a waitress at a night club near an American base, is half jokingly abducted by a few GIs on her way back home, and her young admirer, who barely rescues her, receives a fatal wound during the incident.

What counts here is that, in Shingo's mind as well as Kawabata's, American military power connotes sexual vitality; this throws light on the hidden nature of the dream about the beard. Given the common psychoanalytic reading of a head with a full-grown beard as a phallic symbol, it follows that this monumental beard is a symbol of male sexuality. Important here is the shifted attribution of American nationality from the son's comb to the dream content, the emergence of which Shingo unreflectively ascribes to his newly acquired Japanese electric razor. Of course, the more absurd and unrealistic the dream, the better are the chances of censorship and disfigurement of the latent desire; this is probably one reason why a foreign land far away, picked at random from recent experience, is chosen as the location of the dream. However, there seem to be other, subtle workings of the mind which explain the transference of American nationality from the comb.

Perhaps in Shingo's unconscious, his pains of aging overlap with those of his contemporary, war-traumatized Japan, and he wishes to get away from them. In the park where Shingo has a date-like walk with Kikuko, the "vast green expanse" fashioned with a Western "vista" makes him feel "free" as if they were "getting out of Japan." According to Hyodo Masanosuke, in his own life Kawabata was heavily despondent over the defeat of Japan until the writing of The Sound of the Mountain. As Kawasaki points out, Shuichi's extramarital affair, which causes Shingo nothing but distress, is "a part of the 'national' desolation." At the same time, as a Japanese of the old moralistic school, he is at a loss with this new "freedom of feelings" which "inevitably leads to sexual association," in Catherine Merken's words. The exotic, Edenic situation, amidst which he unexpectedly finds himself, "did not rest well with him," and he feels it "very odd" to walk with his daughter-in-law among "liberated" young people, including some Americans.

Probably more relevant is the preoccupation with hair, which forms one of the serious concerns of Shingo and his friends in terms of their waning life power, and which is acutely illustrated in Kitamoto's case. Cleaning the electric razor which he calls "a finely tooled product of modern civilization," Shingo finds "only white hairs" falling on his knees to his silent dismay. By extracting an intangible attribute from Shuichi's comb, Shingo's dreaming ego wishes to be as young as his son, as it had once happened in the sexually overt dream of the islands.

At the same time, the extracted American nationality is associated with the beard through the electric razor, because this small device that mechanically removes the beard is functionally similar to the American militarism that eliminates its enemy with such machines as bombers and men-of-war. By contrast, in its unproductive, "peaceful" use, the comb more fittingly stands for Japan that had little industrial capability immediately after World War II and proclaimed in its new constitution the abandonment of war as a means of solving international disputes. What takes place covertly in Shingo's dream is thus a shift from metonymy to metaphor, that is, from nationality linked to original places of production to a nationality of qualitative attributes.

Furthermore, the dislocated nationality has a more immediate political implication in the dream. The bearded man cannot "of his own free will" change his beard, since it is now designated a national monument by the American government. Tsuruta stresses the significance of the governmental authority in this prohibition. But why does the government in the dream have to be American? In fact, this kind of forcibly imposed restriction was commonplace in occupied Japan. For instance, on January 31, 1947, an impending general strike was miscarried not because of the opposition of the Japanese government but through an order from the GHQ. The dream-work cunningly puts it so that the man must let the beard grow with the authority of none other than the American government.

Significantly, Kikuko, who provided the day's residues of the comb and the electric razor, is completely deleted from the manifest dream, a fact that makes us suspect her as the real cause of this dream in Shingo's latent desire. In this sense, the beard in the dream stands for the wished-for vitality of a man's exuberant life.

Earlier in the novel, Shingo was similarly impressed by another phallic symbol, i.e., the huge sunflower heads with their stamens systematically arranged. In his persistent, but stifled desire for revitalization, the beard of the dream is associated with this botanic image in four ways. First, they are both symbols of male sexuality in a Freudian sense. Second, in terms of head imagery, the sunflowers, which made Shingo think of "heads of famous people," at least partially have given rise to the dream of a celebrated head with a monumental beard. Third, the massive, but calm "strength" that Shingo felt in the flowers is analogous to several kinds of power, especially sexual and miraculous ones, statically inherent in the very American nationality of the cumbersome beard. Fourth, the repeated orderliness of "quietly systematic" stamens and various whiskers "each in its proper place" reveals Shingo's incessant longing for a brain of unclouded intellect. This last point is compatible with his notion of a technologically advanced America. In addition, as if to reinforce the symbolic connection between beard and plants, the quiet manner he brushes away his "very short white hairs" cut off with the electric razor reminds us of how he did not like to see the fallen sunflowers.

In this dream, Shingo seeks the vitality of life—especially sexual life, which he always feels is being lost—in the shape of a wonderful but impossible beard. This is verified at the end of the dream, when "[l]ooking at the wondrous assortment of colors in the beard, Shingo half felt that it was his own;" and further, "[s]omehow he felt the man's pride and confusion as his own." It follows that the dream about the beard is a reversal of the fear of death his old age brings about. Only after he regains confidence in his sexual power in this dream, is his dreaming ego directed to the unconsciously desired physical relationship with his daughter-in-law in the next dream as a possible antidote to that fear.

With the pictorial, regressive nature of dreams in mind, the missing conjunction between two successive dreams ought to be supplemented again. In the earlier set of two dreams, the hidden conjunction was "because," since the fact of Shingo's crippled sexuality was first exposed and then he wished for a revitalized self. In the present case, the erased conjunction is "if," for something improbable first happens before the dreaming ego turns to the real object of its desire. "If" he became rejuvenated and acquired the sexual vigor symbolically inherent in the foreign beard, "if" such impossibilities came true, then, he would be able to enjoy the love of his daughter-in-law with secure confidence. But, because of the intervening superego, the second dream undergoes great changes and is made extremely insipid and unpleasant. Unlike the earlier cases in which he felt "a flicker of youth," he considers it to be "too dreary that no flicker of lust had come over him" this time, and he calls it the "ugliness of old age." His failure in the unconscious attempt at a revitalized life is obvious.

Having interpreted the second dream in a disturbing way, Shingo momentarily resists his own moral conscience:

What was wrong with loving Kikuko in a dream?

What was there to fear, to be ashamed of, in a dream? And indeed what would be wrong with secretly loving her in his waking hours? He tried this new way of thinking.

But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: "I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower." The gloom only grew denser.

Admittedly, he still keeps his emotional attachment to Kikuko after this night of two dreams, and his last two subsequent dreams contain some sexual elements. But it is only after this full recognition of his latent desire that Shingo comes out of the "filthy slough" of his psyche. Now that this libidinal problem is undisguisedly detected, he understands what it is and where it lies. With this realization, it is impossible for his moral conscience to let his smoldering, incestuous impulse run its course. He not only tries to detach himself from his daughter-in-law, but also makes more serious attempts to resolve family problems, especially the marriage troubles involving Kikuko, Shuichi, and his mistress.

Towards the end of the novel, when Shingo suggests that she live with Shuichi away from him and Yasuko, he feels "a certain danger" in Kikuko's wish rather to look after him if she gets divorced. Her words sound to him "like a first expression of ardor." Still, unlike upon the previous occasion when Kikuko made a similar confession from behind the Noh mask, he can consciously resist the undoubtedly imagined seduction and tell her, in Shuichi's words, that she should be "freer" from him. In the seventh dream, as Tsuruta notices, Shingo appears as a young army officer with a number of phallic symbols (a sword and three pistols) ("Jikan to Kukan"; "Yume no Kaishaku"). This time, it is not Kikuko but Yasuko's sister whom he visits after a perilous trip through the mountains. According to Tsuruta's interpretation, one of the two eggs, from which a small snake is hatched in the eighth dream, might stand for the procreative result of his intercourse with his disfigured daughter-in-law in the "evil dream" ("Jikan to Kukan"; "Yume no Kaishaku"). At the same time, however, this last dream no longer shows even implicitly a desire for sexual contact itself, a fact that suggests his mixed sentiments of lingering affection and growing restraint.

Thus, the pair of dreams on that rainy night force Shingo to directly face what has been covertly kept from conceptualization. As Hatori Tetsuya points out, once he is confronted with the real desire of his unconscious, he can no longer have dreams of the same sexual implications. This new self-awareness eventually makes him prepared to reject the terminative linearity of time, since his artificial means of resisting time have collapsed. He accepts instead, as Tsuruta argues, the unending cyclicity of time which includes death as a natural solution ("Jikan to Kukan"; "Yama no Oto to Ishi no Tenshi"). In the last chapter, talking about the seasonal topoi in haiku, Shingo compares himself to an autumn trout. "Worn out, completely exhausted," these creatures descend to the sea after they "have laid their eggs" for the next cycle of life. Shingo thus reaches a final, relatively peaceful state of mind. The dream of the beard is particularly significant in the sense that, with its implicit symbolism, it provides the requisite condition for the liminal wish-fulfillment of Shingo's latent desire. And, through the ultimate failure of this desire, this dream helps him bring about his self-realization as a man of full maturity and responsibility.

Along with the coupling of the dreams, the dream of the extraordinary, foreign beard shows the protagonist's grave concern with life and death. It is also closely related to the reality of occupied Japan where the American military presence penetrated all the strata of society, even the psyche of an aging man. Far from being absurd or irrelevant, the dream of the beard thus proves to be an integral part of the novel. Originating in dispersed references to the social situation as well as in the protagonist's unsolved psychological problems, this particular dream gives more coherence to a work that critics tend to regard as loosely organized. Its fundamental problem is aging which brings about the fear of death symbolized by the rumbling sound of the mountain. Shingo's dream visions, including the beard and the pairing, are the attempts of his psychic being to resist and escape this fear. The Freudian model proves to be of pivotal importance in this analysis that shows at once Kawabata's great interest in Freudian concepts and his adroit use of psychoanalytic motifs in one of his major novels.