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 message: 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.”