The great shame of Japanese society

Things get increasingly worse for the Ogata family in Yasumari Kawabata's novel "The Sound of the Mountain," this family that at first, on the surface, seemed to "typically" Japanese - reserved, reverent of elders - and gradually we see how everything's unhinged - the daughter-in-law, who's the only person in the family whom the main character, the patriarch, Shingo, seems to like let alone love, has an abortion, because she can't stand the idea bearing a child by her husband Shuichi (Shingo's son), and then we learn that Shuichi went to his mistress to get the money to pay for the abortion - this family is steeped in pain and guilty and shame. I'm starting to see that ever more so in the background is the Japanese humiliation during the war (the novel is set in the mid to late '50s): a few references to the poverty, and occasionally Shingo will see Americans, on the train or in a park, and the Americans are clearly the occupiers - and we can only imagine how the Japanese must have felt about that - completely betrayed by their so-called Emperor. Isn't it one of the great mysteries how Japan - despite its lust for power and territory - could have sided with the Nazis? Could any two people have been any more different? This must have been some of the shame seeping into Japanese society after the war, when the survivors looked around and wondered what it was that they'd done. Kawabata plays all this out through the intense and private domestic drama of a single family: as in the nation itself, things are not as calm as they seem on the surface, in fact they're horrible.