by Kenzaburo Oe
Shortly after my brother-in-law, the film director Goro Hanawa, committed suicide, Jean S. happened to be throwing another of her famous parties. Edward W. Said was there, and he entertained the guests by playing the piano—something he did exceedingly well. When Jean shared the news about Goro, Said apparently sat down and wrote a condolence note on the back of the score of the Beethoven piece he had just finished playing. Later, Jean made a clean copy of the draft on plain paper, carefully transcribing Said’s longhand scrawl for added legibility, and faxed it to me in Tokyo (I’ve never made the transition to email). After Said died, Jean told me that if the original note ever turned up again, she would send it to me.
For the first time that day Akari was showing an active interest in what I was doing, and he cast an expert eye on the sheet music as it emerged from the wrappings. “Those are the three sonatas dedicated to Haydn,” he announced. I knew from a long letter Jean S. had sent earlier that Said had been playing the second of those sonatas at her party. Looking through the score, I quickly located his distinctive penciled annotations, and then I stuck the slim booklets back in their folder.
I shepherded Akari to the nearest restroom, which was down on the first floor. Then, in the interest of efficiency, I quickly washed his hands and mine as well. This was another departure from the normal routine—he usually performed such simple functions by himself—and it clearly intensified his already disgruntled mood. On the way back upstairs we stopped in at the hospital gift shop, where I bought a plastic pouch containing two sharpened pencils: HB and B (medium soft and slightly softer, respectively).
When we returned to the seats where we’d left our things, I handed Akari the B pencil (the softer of the two) along with the sheet music for the sonatas. As he held out his hands to receive these unexpected gifts, my son’s formerly downcast face was transmogrified by joy.
Whenever Akari was reading sheet music he would always draw light circles around certain bars or measures with a pencil, exerting barely any force. For reasons unknown to me, he would also write an assortment of glyphlike symbols in the margins. I had already ascertained that the sheet music (which was, in effect, a posthumous bequest from my dear friend Edward W. Said) was printed on exceptionally thick, sturdy paper. My long-range plan was to transcribe any notations Akari might make on those pages onto the ordinary music-store sheet music for the same sonatas, which I knew we had at home. I figured if I wielded the eraser with particular care, no visible marks would remain on the originals.
Akari began reading the sheet music, holding one booklet at arm’s length in front of his chest, and I caught a whiff of the same intoxicating aroma of vintage ink and paper that suffused the innumerable volumes of European special editions in my library. Before long my son was completely immersed in the scores, and I hesitated to disturb him.
In a low voice, I ventured a question: “Is it interesting?”
“Yes, very interesting!”
“I’m glad. Could I take a quick peek at the sheet music for the second sonata?”
“Oh, that part is really interesting!” Akari replied, tapping his finger on the relevant section with an emphatic staccato rhythm.
“My friend Jean mentioned in an earlier letter that Edward Said played the first theme humorously, while the second one sounded sad and mournful,” I said. “At the time, I said to you, ‘Please choose your favorite CD of this piece from your collection.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes! And I put on the Friedrich Gulda recording,” Akari said eagerly. “He played it the same way, too.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “It was just the same, and with the volume muted as well. Could you please circle the relevant sections to show me where those passages are? Then when we get home I’ll listen to the CD again, using your annotated score for reference.”
A huge grin spread across Akari’s face, and it occurred to me that this was the first time I had seen my son looking so happy since my return to Tokyo. He turned his attention back to the sheet music, and I felt a sense of relief as I watched him intently following the tempo of the written notes, while the imagined music welled up inside him. Then I remembered that as we were rushing out of the house earlier I had grabbed the first volume of The Golden Bough and brought it along. (I’d been randomly paging through those books since finding them in the red leather trunk.) I fished the book out of my bag and began to read.
Akari, meanwhile, had finished examining the second of the three booklets of sheet music and was now going through it again, starting with the first movement. I was sitting next to my son, of course, and the seat on his other side was occupied by a woman who looked as if she might be a schoolteacher. The sheet music was so large that it protruded into her space; I felt awkward and apologetic about the encroachment, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, she appeared to be intrigued by Akari’s fervent concentration.
By the time we were finally summoned to see the doctor, after waiting for a good three hours, Akari had placed the sheet music on his knees and was staring blankly at it, wearily cradling his head in his hands. It took me longer than expected to fit the booklets back into their envelope, and Akari, who was watching me anxiously out of the corner of his eye, became agitated and marched off to the exam room by himself.
At that point, the woman in the neighboring chair spoke. “Why don’t you just leave those things with me?” she suggested. “It doesn’t look as if my name will be called any time soon.”
After our session with the doctor, Akari and I returned to our seats in the waiting room. The woman handed me the envelope containing the sheet music, and Akari resumed his intensive perusal of the scores. Leaving him there, I ambled over to the cashier’s window and took my place at the end of the line. After I’d settled the bill and was returning to the seating area, I saw Akari handing something to the woman as she got to her feet (she had apparently been called in for her own appointment at last).
Our paths crossed in the middle of the room, and the woman laughingly brandished a fat ballpoint pen in my face. “This is really handy—it has two different colors!” she said. “The ink is easier to see, too, so Akari didn’t need to squint so much.”
It took an epic effort of will to control the borderline-violent feelings welling up inside me. I rushed back to where Akari was sitting with one booklet of sheet music open on his lap. He had drawn a heavy, dark circle around the passage we had discussed earlier, and in the blank space at the top of the page he had written “K. 550” in gigantic, indelible letters!
Akari glanced at me, beaming happily, but when he saw the grim expression on my face his smile was quickly extinguished. He stammered in a weak voice, “I-I don’t like to write with pale, thin letters, so …” The sentence trailed off, unfinished.
“You’re an idiot!” I shouted.
Akari’s face crumpled into a roiling mass of strong emotions. After a brief, frozen moment he raised both arms above his head and began to flap them violently against his ears, like flightless wings. There was only one way to interpret this behavior: clearly, he was trying to injure himself. It had been quite a while since I had seen Akari act out like this, but on the rare occasions when I had scolded him in the past, he had invariably reacted with sullen defiance accompanied by an attempt to punish himself physically, as he was doing now.
While the people around us stared openly—I couldn’t really blame them; at the very least, this behavior wasn’t the sort of thing you expect to see from a large man in his forties—I yanked Akari to his feet. I grabbed the sheet music booklets, which had fallen to the floor, and marched my distraught son downstairs and out of the building.
I couldn’t have imagined then how vast the repercussions of my thoughtless and intemperate speech would be, but I was already thinking, over and over again, YOU’RE the bloody idiot.
6
As we were riding home in the taxi, Akari kept his face turned away from me, and his body language conveyed a single unambiguous mes
sage: I reject you completely. He wasn’t rubbing his forehead against the window, as he sometimes did when he was upset; he simply sat and stared at the passing cityscape while keeping his back unnaturally straight.
When Chikashi opened the gate to let us in, Akari practically knocked her over in his headlong rush to get to his room. I put the envelope containing the three scores on the dining table and sat down on the nearest chair. Chikashi, with her finely tuned mother’s intuition, had immediately sensed something unusual about Akari’s behavior, and after sitting with me in silence for a few moments she got up and went into his bedroom.
Being careful not to look at the pages that had been permanently defaced with two different colors of ballpoint ink, I took the three scores out of the envelope and laid them on the table. Then I began to read the tiny words written in pencil on the back cover of the second score. I recognized those scribbles immediately as the words Jean S. had copied over in fountain pen and faxed to me. That fax had been pinned to the wall in front of my desk for the past several years.
What Said had written on the back of the Beethoven score, in English, was his supportive outpouring of sympathy upon learning that my longtime friend and brother-in-law, the film director Goro Hanawa, had committed suicide by jumping off a building in Tokyo. I had translated the note into Japanese and had later quoted it at the memorial service held in Tokyo for Edward W. Said himself after he finally succumbed to leukemia in 2003. (By that time, I had long since committed those eloquent condolences to memory, in both languages.)
I’ve just heard from Jean about the difficulties you’ve been having, and therefore thought I’d write and express my solidarity and affection. You are a very strong man and a sensitive one, so the coping will occur, I am sure.
Chikashi returned to the table. The desecrated sheet music lay spread out in front of me, but I wasn’t looking at it. With her eyes fixed on the three scores, Chikashi began to speak.
“Akari is very concerned about having inadvertently damaged the sheet music for the Beethoven piano sonata,” she said, “but he also told me that you called him an idiot? Nothing like that has ever happened before, not even once, and to be honest I’m in a state of shock. In the past, you’ve always gone to the opposite extreme. Surely you remember the time when you actually came to blows with someone who said those same cruel words to Akari when we were on the train coming home from Kita-Karuizawa, and you ended up being forced to get off the Takasaki? Then when the railway police decided the incident was too serious for them to handle, you were dragged to the municipal police station, and we all went there together. I told Akari that his father would never say such a thing to him, but he won’t listen. He just keeps repeating, ‘Papa said to me, “You’re an idiot.”‘
“Akari knows he did something wrong,” Chikashi continued, “but he seems to want to explain the reason behind his actions. He says he was only writing some notes about Beethoven’s second piano sonata, which I gather you had asked for, in ballpoint pen.”
“It’s true,” I interrupted. “I did call Akari an idiot.” (I was feeling immeasurably sad and sorry, of course, but I still wasn’t able to subdue the anger churning inside me, so I took refuge in self-serving rationalization.) “The thing is, the draft of the condolence message Edward Said wrote at Jean’s house right after Goro died was on the back of the sheet music for the second sonata. So you can see why that particular score is so precious to me.”
After I had shown Chikashi the cover of the booklet in question, I opened it to the defiled page—again, with my eyes averted because it would have been too painful to look at it directly. Chikashi took the opened score and went into Akari’s room. I could hear the conversation: Chikashi asking the same questions over and over in a gentle, restrained voice and then, after a long pause, Akari’s replies, in which he seemed somehow to be resisting his own resistance.
I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, but soon changed my mind. Instead, I poured a mixture of dark beer and lager (one full bottle of each) into a giant goblet, then drained the entire glass in a single gulp and let out a deep sigh that somehow morphed into a loud belch. As I was about to return to the dining room, I saw Akari coming in through the other door, propelled from behind by Chikashi. Ignoring me completely, he took a CD off the shelf and handed it to his mother.
In the meantime, I had made a hasty U-turn and was in the kitchen refilling my goblet (this time only with regular beer) when I heard the sounds of a piano recording. As I stood there listening to the first strains of Gulda’s performance (he was playing the first movement of the second of the three sonatas Beethoven wrote and dedicated to Haydn in 1795), I was jolted once again by the thought that this was probably the same way Edward Said would have performed this composition.
The music ended, and a few seconds later the air was filled with the sound of Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor, K. 550. I couldn’t tell who was wielding the baton, but the melody was an unmistakable echo of the theme of the passage we had heard a few minutes earlier. I downed my second glass of beer and went into the dining room, where Akari was in the process of carefully replacing the two CDs in their clear plastic cases.
“Akari keeps saying he was trying to use the sheet music he was looking at in the waiting room to show you what these two compositions have in common,” Chikashi said. “So he was shocked when you responded by screaming, ‘You’re an idiot!’”
I glanced reluctantly at the page of sheet music, hideously defaced by two colors of ballpoint pen, which Chikashi had laid out again on the dining-room table. No one spoke for several minutes, but there seemed to be some kind of crucial decision floating in the air. Then Akari, who appeared to have been waiting for me to make some sort of conciliatory gesture, gave up and shambled off to his room. I couldn’t help thinking, not for the first time, that his distinctive gait bore a startling resemblance to the way Goro Hanawa used to walk.
This all happened on a Saturday. A week passed, during which I hardly saw my son at all. I spent most of my time in my upstairs lair—a book-filled study equipped with a narrow bed—while Akari remained sequestered in his room. (This wasn’t a dramatic change from his usual behavior; he always spent a great deal of time in his bedroom, where he could listen to classical music programs on the FM radio next to his bed. When he got bored with the radio, he kept several of his favorite CDs cued up in his personal boom box and he enjoyed letting them play over and over on an endless loop.) In order to avoid running into Akari at breakfast or lunch I would creep downstairs in midmorning and eat a solitary brunch, then trudge back upstairs.
One day during this bleak period Chikashi brought me the mail as usual, along with a cup of coffee. While I was glancing over the letters she tidied up my bed and sat down on the newly smooth covers. Then she began to talk about the extra-large elephant in the room—a topic that hadn’t been touched upon since the tense, emotionally fraught session in the dining room.
“Akari says that when you were at the hospital the other day, you asked him to show you the musical similarities between the Beethoven piano sonata and the Mozart symphony,” she said slowly. “Evidently he was in the process of marking the pertinent passages in pencil when the lady who was sitting next to him lent him a ballpoint pen. Naturally, it’s hard for Akari to understand the subtle distinction whereby it’s perfectly fine to use pencil but switching to pen causes his father to have a major meltdown and call him names in public. Akari just happened to accept the seemingly innocuous loan of a pen. Really, wasn’t that his only mistake? He does seem to understand now that he shouldn’t have defaced the pristine sheet music, even though the damage he did was unintentional. But because of the extreme way you reacted, shouting, ‘You’re an idiot’—which, as you know, is the single most hurtful thing you could possibly say to him—he doesn’t feel inclined to return to the amicable relations the two of you enjoyed before this happened. For your part, you’re apparently unwilling to make the first move toward a peaceful
settlement, so things seem to be at an impasse.
“I talked to Maki on the phone this morning, and I have to say that the way she criticized your behavior gave me chills. ‘Papa doesn’t have the courage to make his peace with Akari,’ she said. ‘I mean, he called Akari an idiot, for God’s sake. I’m sure Papa is wallowing in his own private darkness now, wondering if there’s any way to erase the egregious incident from Akari’s memory, weighing various options before ultimately deciding there’s nothing to be done. And that’s why Papa won’t even try to make his peace with Akari; he figures it’s hopeless, and he’s simply given up.’ And then she went on to say that for the past year or so, every time she has come to visit us here in Seijo she’s been noticing a gradual change in Akari, but she thinks you have probably overlooked it. She said, ‘Papa and Akari have been practically inseparable for more than forty years, and it seems to me that Papa’s oppressive (some might even say tyrannical) attitude toward Akari has become more and more set in stone. I know it probably has something to do with Papa’s advancing age; I understand the reasons, and I’m not unsympathetic, but I’m afraid that if this situation continues to fester it could go way beyond the level of terrible insults like “You’re an idiot.” I mean, I think matters could easily escalate to the point of physical violence or permanent estrangement.’
“Maki was quite worked up, and she said some pretty extreme things. ‘I’m afraid Papa could end up like King Lear,’ she told me, ‘wandering lost in the wilderness without even a Fool to accompany him. And if he went on wandering alone until he started to lose his mind, then maybe he would decide to resolve things himself, in the most drastic way, before he did anything that might cause a public scandal. And if he did decide to do away with himself, God knows there’s plenty of deserted wasteland around here where he could do the deed …’