Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (14 page)

A postcard—a big blue Yves Klein—said that the chemotherapy seemed to be working and that he thought he could maybe go home at the beginning of the month. I put it down on my desk and remembered.

Small hands cupped over the keys, an index finger stretching to push down the black while the thumb held the white, and softly, as though the secrets of a lock were being probed, the sound of Satie had emerged.

I remember Toru when he was young, back in 1955 or so, playing that old concert grand at the Sogetsu Hall where we met to see new art or look at new films or listen to new music. There was Hiroshi Teshigahara, who was later to make W
ornan of the Dunes
for which Toru would do the score, and whose father owned the hall; there was Kuniharu Akiyama who would turn into a fine music critic before dying eventually of stomach cancer; and there was Toru.

We listened while he put the notes together, shaping them as if from clay, holding, warming the tones. Those small-boned works seemed to fit his hands. I could not imagine Liszt—or even Messiaen, whom he was beginning to like—coming from them. Rather, something sparer, more discreet.

He was a student then—small body, large head. We sat around the piano at Sogetsu Hall listening. Satie rolled over the keys like a kitten, and outside the cicadas sang as though summer would last forever.

When we had heard enough the hands would drop from the keyboard and turn themselves into an ocarina. Out of the cupped palms, the thumbs a mouthpiece, came "The Tennessee Waltz." (I remember him years later, at a bar called The Cradle, cradling his fingers and doing his ocarina arrangement of "Red River Valley" to the delight of Francis Coppola. Later still we sat stalled in traffic and he gave me "Don't Get Around Much Anymore.")

Sometimes, on being asked, he would turn again to the piano and play something of his own, his manner diffident and yet assured. I no longer remember what it was, nor do I recall what I felt on first hearing his music. The
Requiem for Strings
was still at the back of his mind and would not appear for several more years. He had yet to take the score of
Jeux
off with him into the mountains to keep him company while he composed
November Steps.

Up there, besides Debussy, there was the neighbor's music box (it played the "theme" from
Swan Lake)
and the sound of water, the rustle of the wind. All of these went somehow into the score he eventually produced. But they went so deep you can no longer really hear them. The rush of the shakuhachi, the clatter of the biwa, seem to owe nothing to Tchaikovsky, though somehow it is the same landscape, the same steppes. Takemitsu did not like things that floated on the surface. He once listened to another Japanese composer go on and on about the musical possibilities of insect sounds, even that of the common cicada
(semi).
Toru turned to Peter Grilli, sitting next to him, and said: Semimusic.

Now, remembering those small hands on that distant keyboard, I am surprised that such modest movements came to create such large emotions. Now I listen and find I am confronting something vast. In the later works the small has become enormously magnified—a snowflake big as a palace, a sea anemone swaying above us like a mother ship—an expanded natural world, alive, internally coherent, complete in its complexity.

Three decades after the first time, I sat in a concert hall and heard the Takemitsu violin concerto. It has a title,
Far Voices, Calling Far
(Yeats? Joyce?), attractive more for its sound than its sense. The ghost of Satie
(Embryons desséchés, Véritables préludes flasques)
hovers there above the score. The violin climbs, then soars, the orchestra dropping away from the cliff's edge. Then, far below, like the sea, the instruments resurge and, as though the laws of physics had been reinvented for the ear, right themselves to catch as in a net the soaring line. And then silence ... until, later, "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," done on his hand ocarina, evoking a look of sheer delight on the face of Richard Brautigan, a face that rarely smiled and finally failed to smile forever.

It is now much later. I turn off the CD of the violin concerto, look at the Klein, and think of Toru in hospital during those last days, rays shooting through his small body, picking at the knot of the illness. And I remember his wake and wondering at how small the box was, then remember his face as he bent over the keyboard, breaking into a smile and nodding in silent satisfaction as the proper combination was found, the levers turned, the door opened.

I sometimes bought flowers in the shop where she worked, a small shop without much of a selection but conveniently near where I lived. She was a pleasant, open-faced woman in her thirties. Her smile was usually so ready that I was sometimes surprised to see her frowning in the back of the shop when I passed.

As the seasons changed and I bought irises, asters, chrysanthemums, we took to greeting each other as I went by—I on my way to work, she already busy cutting and arranging.

She would look up, scissors in one hand, a long-stemmed flower in the other, and nod, smile, wish me a good morning. But only some of the time.

At other times I would see her there bending over the flowers, would smile, prepare to speak. When I passed, however, she would give me only an empty glance, returning at once to her work. The next time, as I prepared to pass without a word, she might look up, nod, smile, and wish me a very good morning.

What, I wondered, was the reason for this? Had I perhaps done something to make her behave in this way? These typically, guiltily, were the thoughts that first came to mind.

Or did all foreigners truly look alike, as I had often enough been told, and did she only intermittently recognize me? Or, rather, perhaps, was there something the matter with her—some sort of mental trouble where she was only occasionally herself and I, consequently, myself only occasionally to her?

The mystery continued. I could not understand her behavior, and though it derived from a person who had no other part in my life, one whose actions ought to have made no difference to me, I began when alone to think about her, to brood on possible reasons for it.

And, more and more, I began to think that it was somehow my fault, that I was doing something, all unintentionally, that was offending her. When I failed to do this, then she came out, flowers in both hands, smiling as though grateful that I was behaving myself. When she saw, however, that I was doing it again—whatever it was—then she hid her hands in her apron and silently retreated, once again disappointed in me and showing it with a sullen stare or a mere glance of ill will.

Should I ask her to explain, I wondered. But how to go about it? In English one could, I suppose, approach a woman in a flower shop and ask her why she was behaving so strangely. Certainly odder things than this were done in the country I had come from. But I could not imagine doing this in Japan—could not even think how to phrase my hypothetical question. Besides, I was now convinced that I was doing something, innocent though it might be, that in some way merited this response. The one acting strangely was, somehow, myself.

After reaching this conclusion, I now discovered that the flower woman was haunting me. I thought about her before I went to sleep. I found myself thinking of her when I awoke. If she had been consistently friendly or consistently unfriendly, then I would not have spared her a thought.

It was the inconsistency that had snared me. Like fishermen and gamblers, I had become hooked by random circumstance. I never knew what to expect and was always driven to find out. This, I thought, was how they drive rats mad. The unhappy rodent pushes the bar; sometimes it gets a food pellet, sometimes an electric shock: it never knows which to expect. If it did—sated or electrocuted—it would stop pushing the bar.

I could, of course, have crossed the street or taken another route to the morning subway. But I didn't. I even looked forward to the daily encounter at the flower shop. Which would it be today—acknowledgment or rebuttal; food pellet or electric shock?

Then, one fine spring day when I was in an entirely different part of the city, I happened to pass a florist's and, glancing in, I suddenly remembered something I hadn't really noticed before. When the flower woman was friendly she was wearing a green sweater. But when she changed and put on a red sweater she turned unfriendly.

Now what, I wondered, could be the relationship between her sweaters and her attitude toward me? Did she rush and change from red to green or from green to red when she saw me coming down the street? Was she attempting to communicate with me? Don't smile and speak if you see me in red—was that what she was saying?

And, if so, why? I pondered this question. It took on an inordinate importance. I could not look at flowers now without thinking of the baffling woman, smiling, hands full of flowers, or frowning, hands hidden in apron. I was beginning to despair of ever solving the mystery of which I was somehow the cause.

Not long afterward, I was walking again past the flower shop. Aha, she has her red sweater on today. Very well, do not smile, do not speak. Merely cast one cold glance.

As I was casting this one cold glance I saw that she was cutting the stems of some flowers, and that she was having difficulty in doing so, holding the stems with a forearm while she cut with one hand. This was because she only had one hand. The other arm ended at the wrist.

Stopping at the next street corner I stood and thought, remembering her well in her green sweater, both hands full of flowers. She had had two hands then. Had there been an accident, suddenly, recently? Had it happened in a moment of abstraction—perhaps thinking about my strange behavior?

But, no. The stump looked as if it had healed years ago. And then I remembered that on her red-sweater days she usually hid her hands in her apron. There was the answer—she was hiding her stump. But on her green-sweater days—what then? Why was there no stump?

Now actively curious, I asked the tobacco lady. She knew everything else in the neighborhood and would certainly be able to satisfy my curiosity in this.

- Oh, them, she said when I asked: Meiko and Reiko. They have this sick mother. Not surprising, at eighty-something. So they take turns looking after her.

I gazed at her, bereft. The mystery had suddenly collapsed. I no longer had anything to look forward to on my walks to the subway.

Next morning it was Reiko in red. I looked at her stump. Perhaps she had lost her hand in the war. Perhaps we had done it after all and she focused her hatred on me for ruining her life. Hence the dark glances. Meiko, who had not suffered to this extent, was still friendly. But how to find out? If you couldn't ask people why they were behaving strangely toward you, you certainly couldn't ask how they had lost their hand.

Again I had recourse to the tobacco lady.

- Well, just how old do you think they are anyway? That was forty years ago, you know—the war. They weren't even born back then, though we were, you and me. No, all I know is that she was in a car accident.

The final wisps of mystery evaporated. Reiko's sullenness was simply an understandable reaction to her lot. And Meiko's pleasant openness was the result of her having two hands and being healthy. And my self-centered and paranoid suspicions were because I am the kind of person I am and, perhaps consequently, choose to live in this country—an alien among the natives.

- No, not Sessué. That's how they did it in Hollywood. I've never liked it. Actually, it's Sesshu—like the famous painter. You know, the old one.

He paused, a large man in a formal kimono with family crest: In point of fact, he went on, Kintaro Hayakawa was the name I was born with ... Kintaro—what a name! He chuckled and raised his glass: That was back in Meiji 19, when I was born. Way back then.

Though we were speaking English, Hayakawa named the year 1886 in the traditional Japanese manner. Since his return to Japan in 1949 he had become very Japanese: kimono, bonsai, Zen as well.

He should have been drinking saké, but whiskey-on-the-rocks, that American invention, was in the process of becoming Japanese, and he was drinking at the old Imperial Hotel which, by that time, was thought of as being very Japanese indeed.

- They're going to tear it down, you know, he said, looking around at the stonework: Going to build some big money-making skyscraper hotel instead. And it's not even fifty years old yet... I am, though, he added, then laughed again: How old would you say I am?

I knew. He was eighty, but he looked and acted younger. So I wagged my head as though undecided.

- Well, I won't see seventy again, he said. Then: Why, I can remember when the Imperial opened.

That was in 1922, when Hayakawa was so famous in America that he played himself in a film, a matinée idol in something called
Night Life in Hollywood.
But this I did not mention. He did not like talking about those four decades in California.

Yet he had been one of the most successful of the early Hollywood actors. He had gone to America in 1906 and made his debut there in
Typhoon
, a 1914 Ince film; then went on to make some forty more pictures. He became one of the most popular of the early stars: a romantic lead, the first of the exotic foreigners—Valentino came later—to excite American womanhood from the safety of the silver screen.