Books like The Sound of the Mountain
An ageing patriarch in postwar Japan listens to the mountain and contemplates his family's slow dissolution, beauty, and the nearness of death.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Sound of the Mountain
Snow Country
A Tokyo dilettante travels to a hot-spring town in snow country to visit his geisha lover, and the cold landscape mirrors the impossibility of their connection.
The Master of Go
Kawabata's novelised reporting on the 1938 retirement match of the old Honinbo master of Go, lost to a younger, modern challenger across six months of play.
An Artist of the Floating World
In the years after World War II, a once-celebrated Japanese painter tries to arrange his daughter's marriage while slowly facing the propaganda he made for the imperial cause.
Stoner
A Missouri farm boy becomes a literature professor at the University of Missouri and lives a quiet, thwarted life that only gains shape in its retelling.
Interpreter of Maladies
Nine stories of Indian immigrants and their American-born children, caught between cultures and the quiet tragedies of misunderstanding.
Olive Kitteridge
Thirteen linked stories circle Olive Kitteridge, a fierce, difficult maths teacher in coastal Maine, whose small cruelties and unexpected tenderness touch a whole town.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
A woman develops a tender relationship with her former high school teacher over sake and seasonal food.
The Makioka Sisters
Four Osaka sisters of a declining merchant family try across the late 1930s to marry off the third, as the culture they came from is about to be burned off the map.
Kokoro
A student in Meiji-era Tokyo befriends a withdrawn older man he calls Sensei, whose long final letter reveals the betrayal that hollowed out his life.
The Remains of the Day
An ageing English butler reflects on a lifetime of service, repressed love, and the moral compromises of loyalty to a flawed master.
Iza's Ballad
After her father's death, a well-meaning Budapest doctor brings her widowed mother to live in her modern flat and slowly dissolves the old woman's place in the world.
The Setting Sun
After the war, Kazuko and her aristocratic mother lose their Tokyo house and move to a country villa, where they wait for Kazuko's brother, Naoji, to come home from the army with his addictions intact.