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.

In the following essay, Mori uses dream-interpretation to analyze the dreams of the main character of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain. He concludes that the analysis "shows at once Kawabata's great interest in Freudian concepts and his adroit use of psychoanalytic motifs in one of his major novels."

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...