Still hugging the large blue folder, Akari announced: “Okay, this is it. The sheet music for the Beethoven piano sonata is in here, too.” It was obvious that while he didn’t want to hand the blue binder over to me directly, this was his oblique way of prodding me to explain the contents to Ricchan. “Mrs. Sakura Ogi Magarshack gave it to me,” he added.
“Oh, I know,” I said, as recollection kicked in. “It’s the copy of the final shooting script Sakura gave you to commemorate the completion of the film, when she returned the Beethoven sheet music you loaned her while they were recording the sound track.”
While I was speaking Akari had presented the blue portfolio to Ricchan, but when she opened the cloth cover the sheet music inside (just as Akari had said) fell to the floor. Akari bent over to pick up the pages with an easy alacrity, and it was evident that his muscle-building physical therapy was already yielding results in the form of flexibility and diminished discomfort. After shuffling the sheet music into the proper order, he handed it back to Ricchan.
“All the people I’ve interviewed who were working as extras in the scenes filmed up at the Saya have talked about the way the sound of this music rang out over the meadows,” Ricchan said. “I told you about the women who were talking about that, right? Hearing Sakura Ogi Magarshack perform her battle-cry recitative with this music playing in the background seems to have made a deeper impression on them than almost anything else about the filming.”
“Sakura had the idea of using this Beethoven sonata in the movie, even though it reminded her of some painful memories from her childhood,” I said. “She knew the title of the piece, but it was Akari who helped her to find a recording of the specific performance she had in mind. Sakura was very impressed, as I recall. Akari also figured out the precise length of all the passages that would need to be included in the sound track, and he made those notations on his own copy of the sheet music before he passed it along to the NHK orchestra.”
Ricchan looked thoughtfully at Akari, who was holding the score open to the relevant pages. Then she said, “Akari, do you by any chance have a CD of the performance you chose?”
“You bet I do!” Akari exclaimed enthusiastically. “You’re the one who brought it down from Tokyo for me, Ricchan!” With that, he ran upstairs again, his face alight with an animation I hadn’t seen in recent memory.
Meanwhile, Ricchan and I set about plugging in the sophisticated sound system set up in the great room for use in rehearsals. The speakers were on either side of the raised, brick-floored area that served as a makeshift stage, and in order to maximize the acoustics Ricchan opened the curtains at the south end of the room. During our sojourn at the Forest House, Akari and I had been getting by with just the light from the plate-glass window on the north end. When the young people needed to use the space for rehearsal, we would go upstairs to wait it out. They would open the curtains while the room was in use and then close them again before returning the living area to us.
I knew from previous visits that beyond the window, as springtime marched along, you could see the maples, with their wine-colored buds gradually shading into the palest green; the tall, lush-leafed white birches; two kinds of flowering persimmons — one with edible fruit, the other strictly ornamental; and, finally, the late-blooming dogwoods (both red and white). This spring, however, we had kept the curtains perpetually closed on the south-side garden, so we had missed the seasonal parade of loveliness. The realization struck me as a poignant reminder of the stifling, hermetic existence Akari and I had been mired in since arriving here.
Akari returned with the CD, and as the opulent sound of Beethoven filled every atom of the cavernous space, he was clearly transported into some private realm of sublimity. (Both the composition — the Piano Sonata no. 32 in C Minor, op. 111—and the performance, by Friedrich Gulda, were among his particular favorites.) When the recording reached the second movement, which was the section of the piece used in the film, Akari lifted his head from the score and gave Ricchan a meaningful glance as if to say, This is it.
Ricchan was sitting with the screenplay for Meisuke’s Mother Marches Off to War open on her knees, and she caught Akari’s eye and solemnly bobbed her head, to show she had gotten the message.
4
The next morning, before Akari had emerged from his bedroom and joined us at the breakfast table, Ricchan informed me that she had already called Asa and Unaiko to share the exciting news about the unexpected appearance of the screenplay.
“Asa responded cautiously, as usual. She was happy that I’ve finally gotten a chance to read your version of the story of Meisuke’s mother, but she reminded me that we’d agreed not to pressure you into getting involved with our project on any particular timetable. She also suggested that I ought to take your screenplay with several grains of salt because your interpretation of the saga ‘reeks of male chauvinism,’ as she put it. She said I should tread very carefully going forward.
“Unaiko was really happy to hear that a copy of the screenplay had turned up, and she seems to be eager to forge ahead and express her own concerns through the medium of our upcoming collaboration. As you know, I’ve been asking people from around here to talk about their experiences as extras in the film about Meisuke’s mother, and since I’m passing everything on to Unaiko bit by bit and then taking notes on her comments, I’ve been learning a lot about her method of putting together a dramatic piece. Of course, I hope our wavelengths will eventually become synchronized to the point where I’ll be able to intuit things without even having to ask.
“Regarding the recitative that features so prominently in your screenplay, I asked a number of locals to try to recite it from memory, and I was able to record quite a few different versions. (I gather you can still hear parts of the battle chant — you know, where Meisuke’s mother is rallying her troops before they march off to stage the uprising — at Bon Odori celebrations around these parts.) I’d almost like to say that every person’s rendition was different — both the words and the melody. When I saw the version in the screenplay I said to myself, ‘Ah, this must be written in the slightly old-fashioned style Mr. Choko’s mother and grandmother used when they were reciting this.’ I had to read this part over and over to Unaiko on the phone, but I’m afraid my rendition sounded kind of singsongy. Wait, I’ll show you.” Whereupon Ricchan began to recite, in her trained-musician’s voice:
Women warriors, let us go
Off to face our latest foe.
Into battle we will soar
Strong and brave forevermore.
All together, here we go
We shall vanquish every foe!
“In the screenplay,” Ricchan went on without waiting for me to react, “you used a form of the chant that had apparently been around for a long time, and the chorus section was also in an archaic literary style. I asked Asa whether that was the way you would have heard the recitative from your mother and grandmother when you were a little boy, and she said that, on the contrary, she thought the chant in the screenplay was the result of your applying your novelist’s skills to rewriting it over and over. During the time Unaiko and I have been recording the local women’s memories, in all their disparity, I’ve been entering those accounts into the computer, and it did occur to me that if I kept revising and polishing during the process, we would eventually arrive at a kind of literary style of our own. I was quite excited, but when I mentioned it to Unaiko, she said that since there’s a specific theme she wants to express through this play, she wants to see our play’s language evolve naturally.”