Dogs

Dogs appear throughout the mountain country on the route to Ami Hostel, not as a single emblematic animal but as part of the lived environment. Their howls carry across settlements as the bus climbs through forests and valleys, and one elderly pasture dog becomes the focus of a small, concrete encounter with Naoko, Reiko, and the narrator. Together, these appearances make animal life a recurring presence alongside the novel’s human memories: heard at a distance, met at close range, and marked by age and seasonal change.

Along the Mountain Route

The journey north from Kyoto passes through a repeated pattern of cedar forest and village. In the open basins, farmhouses sit among fields; firewood is stacked outside, and dogs howl. The bus moves on through the landscape, its arrival provoking what the narrator describes as a howling competition. The dogs are not individually identified in these villages, but their collective response makes them audible participants in the route rather than incidental scenery.

As the bus goes deeper into the mountains, the cultivated ground narrows and the slopes press closer to the windows. The settlements are smaller, yet they still have just as many dogs as those encountered earlier. The bus’s arrival again sets off howling. That recurrence links distant communities across the route: the villages differ in scale and setting, but the dogs answer the same passing vehicle with a sound that briefly travels beyond the bus itself.

The sequence also contrasts the human traveler’s passage with the animals’ rooted presence. The narrator is moving toward Ami Hostel, while the dogs belong to the places the bus passes through. Their howling registers the vehicle’s intrusion and departure, but the text does not assign them a human interpretation or reduce them to a single meaning. They remain part of the mountain settlements’ everyday life.

The Pasture Dog

During a walk with Naoko and Reiko, the group passes a fenced pasture where a few horses graze. A big dog runs over, tail wagging; it leans against Reiko, sniffs her face, and jumps playfully on Naoko. When the narrator whistles, it comes to him and licks his hand. The encounter is reciprocal and physical: the dog approaches the visitors, responds to their gestures, and moves among them without needing to be summoned into a symbolic role.

Naoko explains that the dog belongs to the pasture and is nearly twenty years old. His teeth are in such poor condition that he cannot eat hard food. He sleeps in front of the shop during the day and runs to meet people when he hears footsteps. The details place him within a daily routine shaped by his age and limited hearing and eating, rather than presenting him merely as a picturesque feature of the countryside.

Reiko takes a scrap of cheese from her rucksack. The dog catches its scent, bounds toward her, and eats it. The moment is simple but specific: smell, movement, food, and an offered morsel bring the travelers and animal into immediate contact. Later, while the women talk, the narrator strokes the dog under the table. He feels the animal’s hard, stringy neck and scratches its lumpy spots; the dog closes his eyes and sighs with pleasure. The account gives the dog a bodily presence that does not depend on the group’s conversation or on the narrator’s memories of other people.

Pepé and the Café

The dog leads the travelers to a small café, a white house with a porch and a faded coffee-cup sign. The setting belongs to a seasonal mountain economy: Reiko says the horses and cows are taken by truck to the barn in mid-October, while the animals graze in summer, when a small café opens for hikers. She remarks that the visitors may amount to only twenty hikers a day. Against this brief flow of tourists, the dog’s familiar movements—running to footsteps, sleeping on the porch, guiding the party toward the café—make him part of the place’s routine.

The girl at the café gives the dog his name: Pepé. When the narrator speaks to him quietly, Pepé does not move. The girl explains that he is hard of hearing and must be addressed loudly. The narrator shouts his name; Pepé opens his eyes, snaps to attention, and barks. The response makes his hearing difference concrete in a moment of interaction: the name alone is not enough at ordinary volume, but a louder call reaches him.

The girl then tells Pepé to sleep more and live longer. He flops down again at the narrator’s feet. The exchange acknowledges his age without turning it into an abstract lesson. Pepé is tired, hard of hearing, and still responsive to food, touch, footsteps, and a shouted call. His presence at the café is at once companionable and temporary, set against the seasonal movement of the pasture animals and the approaching end of the grazing period.

Animal Presence and the Novel’s Landscapes

The dogs’ appearances span different scales of attention. In the villages, they are heard collectively from a moving bus; beside the pasture, one old dog can be approached, fed, touched, and named. That movement from ambient sound to intimate encounter gives the mountain journey texture without suggesting that every animal has the same function. The village dogs announce the bus, while Pepé’s individual habits and physical limits distinguish him from the unnamed chorus.

Other passages place dogs within landscapes shaped by human memory and loss. On the meadow walk, the narrator recalls distant barking as a hazy sound seeming to come from beyond the woods. In the later account of his travels after Naoko’s death, he walks along the coast, sleeps on the sand, makes fires from driftwood, and listens to the waves while thinking of her. The novel’s landscapes are therefore not empty backdrops: sounds and living creatures belong to places the narrator remembers, crosses, or inhabits. The mountain dogs, in particular, connect the remote route to ordinary life—villages, a pasture, a café, and an elderly animal whose day includes sleep and visitors.

Autumn’s return elsewhere in the narrative sharpens the contrast between cycles of the natural world and human bereavement. The mountain scenes likewise contain changes that do not wait for the traveler: the grazing season ends, animals are moved, and an old dog’s life is described in terms of its remaining time. The text does not claim that these details resolve human grief. Instead, its attention to dogs keeps the nonhuman world present in its own modest particulars, alongside the human stories of memory, separation, and loss.