"By day Ogata Shingo is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he hears a distant rumble from the nearby mountain, a sound he associates with death. In between are the relationships that were once the foundation of Shingo's life: with his disappointing wife, his philandering son, and his daughter-in-law Kikuko, who instills in him both pity and uneasy stirrings of sexual desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments - and the tiny shifts of loyalty and affection that threaten to sever it irreparably - Kawabata creates a novel that is at once serenely observed and enormously affecting."

This is the first novel I have read so far of Yasunari Kawabata. He was the Nobel prize winner in 1968 “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”. Even if the “Japanese mind” works a bit strange for me, I did like the writing and learned a bit more about the Japanese culture.