Naruse was "Japan's most sensitive director of films on disintegrating male-female relationships," according to Japanese-film historian Audie Bock. In Sound of the Mountain, he adapts a well known work by Nobel Prize winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata (see also Snow Country, September 29) as part of his "marriage cycle" of films. Set in the ancient seaside town of Kamakura (near Tokyo) where the novelist himself lived, Naruse's adaptation focuses on Kikuko (Setsuko Hara), a young wife betrayed by her callous, philandering husband (Ken Uehara); and the complex affection she develops for her father-in-law, Shingo (So Yamamura), with whom they live. When the husband's mistress insists on having his child, Kikuko responds by having an abortion of her own. Audie Bock writes, "A subtle study of the inwardly aimed aggressions that emerge in a society that does not view divorce as an option when a married couple feel trapped by each other. Setsuko Hara brilliantly portrays the other possibilities in a young woman's life so carefully omitted from her roles in Yasujiro Ozu's films."