A novel that becomes more mysterious as it moves along: Sound of the Mountain

Yasumari Kawabata's novel "The Sound of the Mountain" kind of sneaks up on you - it's told in a very low-key, unaffected way - the narrator must simply describing in a series of very simple sentences and paragraphs rarely longer than a sentence or maybe two - as an objective observer, much like Ozu's famous "Tatami point of view" - a year or so in the life of the Ogata family (household of four, with another daughter and her two young children in and out of the scene) - and at first it seems rather slow-moving and even placid, the family does not seem extraordinary in any way, but as the novel progresses we see the deeper fissures in their lives and we see that it is a highly dysfunctional family, blown apart by stress and by hypocrisy and by repression - by about half-way through we see that the beloved daughter-in-law, Fikoku (?) has had an abortion because she could not stand bringing a child into the world with her unfaithful husband, the partiarch, Shingo, sees himself as a failure because his two children are great disappointments and are unhappy in their marriages. Part of this is the unraveling of the Japanese extremes of courtesy and decorum, but also the post-war society is always there in the background as well, as increasingly there are glancing references to the ruins of war: the fallout shelters they had to build in the mountains behind the family home, Shikoko (?), the unfaithful husband the sullen son, has a Tokyo girlfriend who is willing to wreck his marriage becuase her husband/boyfriend had been unjustly ripped from her - a war victim. This novel becomes more powerful, and more mysterious, as it moves along.