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 …’
“Maki was very angry about your calling her big brother an idiot,” Chikashi continued, “and I’m sure that’s why she said those things. But putting her concerns aside for now, there are some issues I’ve been worried about myself, and I’d like to discuss them with you. It goes without saying that both you and I are growing older, but have you given any serious thought to the fact that Akari is aging rapidly as well, especially on the physical level? As you know, you added a daily walk to your normal sedentary routine of sitting around the house reading and writing after the doctor said you should take Akari out walking as part of a fitness regimen. It went on for a long time, and then when Akari started having more and more epileptic seizures during your daily walks together, you got into the habit of walking for an hour early in the morning by yourself. You simply gave up taking Akari along. But I think we both understand that the worsening of his epilepsy wasn’t the real reason you gave up walking with Akari. Rather, it was because the degenerative aging process was making it too difficult for him to continue with those outings.