Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (19 page)

The time came, under Mrs. T's guidance, when Eeyore began to compose. Shortly after he had entered middle school, Mrs. T played one of their exercises in a key different from the one in which it had been written and Eeyore, listening, said with conviction, “
This is better!
” Thereafter, when he encountered a melody that pleased him, he asked for it to be played in various keys. Mrs. T incorporated this in her lessons, devising exercises in “shifting keys” and “melody building blocks.” If the former was about tonality, the latter amounted to practice in composing: Mrs. T would begin the fragment of a melody, and when Eeyore picked it up she would take it back. Eventually, this led Eeyore to create entire melodies on his own. Mrs. T went on to teach him how to render a melody he had created in four-part harmony, and before long he was changing the melody in the process. Soon they were playing together, Mrs. T taking the right hand and Eeyore the left, and Eeyore's fingers were bringing beautiful melodies to life.

His specialty was memory. Blake held that memory was a negative function and placed it in opposition to imagination: Blake would have said that a defect called memory bound Eeyore and constrained him from giving flight to his imagination. In any case, once a melody and harmony had roused in him, he did not forget it. After a lesson, sprawled on his belly on the floor of the living room, he filled the staves of a manuscript page with elongated notes like bean sprouts. Nothing distracted him, not even his younger sister and brother watching TV at his side.

On his eighteenth birthday, I had Eeyore's longest composition to date made into a book and printed twenty copies for his friends. I photocopied and bound the pages of his handwritten score and carved the name of the piece and an illustration into a rubber eraser that I used to stamp the cover: The Hikari [Eeyore's real name] Partita in D Major, opus 2. The piece began with a prelude and six variations: an allemande, a courante, two sarabandes, a siciliana, and a gigue. Not surprisingly, the structure of the piece followed closely the Bach that Eeyore listened to repeatedly, but his melodies and harmony seemed to me to reveal a degree of originality. In Eeyore's daily progress with the writing, Mrs. T perceived growth that went beyond the development of his piano technique. In fact, the demands of a piece Eeyore referred to as a partita, while he had strictly observed the rules of piano fingering in writing it, exceeded his own technical capacity to perform it.

In mid-autumn we received a request for a collaboration between Eeyore as a composer and myself as a writer. Across a stream full of trout from the mountain cabin in Gumma prefecture where we spent our summers, there was a facility where physically and mentally handicapped children grew their own vegetables and practiced communal living. My wife and I had taken Eeyore there for a tour ten years earlier. Though he had never been cowed by anything before, on that day Eeyore had clung to my wrist and refused to let go. At the time he was only as tall as my waist. Presently my wife and I had realized that he was afraid of being abandoned there.

Now the facility was planning a festival to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary this coming Christmas and had asked us to consider creating a musical play for the handicapped children to perform. As time was growing short, they would leave the format to us. They asked only that we avoid music too complex and drama too full of action to be performed, and that we take as our theme the role played by the weak in helping to avoid the horrors of war. I accepted their proposal right away and was excited about writing a libretto.

The theme we had been assigned prompted me to reconsider a question having to do with the handicapped that had been posed to me as a kind of homework assignment the year before. Eeyore had just been promoted to the high school division of his special school, and the national meeting of the PTAs from special facilities all over Japan had convened in Tokyo. As the father of a handicapped child, I addressed the meeting. On my way to the train station afterward, a pair of female teachers with their vigorous legs stuffed into rugged jeans overtook me to ask for my help in solving a problem. The year before, the senior students at their special facility had traveled to Hiroshima on their annual excursion. The exhibits at the Peace Museum replicating the horror at the time of the explosion had jolted the children. And it seemed to their teachers that all the children had somehow changed. This year they wanted to return to Hiroshima, but some parents were opposed; what advice could I give them on how to change their minds?

The young women were convinced that I would be in favor of a school trip to Hiroshima for their handicapped children, but when I pictured Eeyore and his classmates filing through the dimness of the Peace Museum I felt uncomfortable. I told the young teachers that I couldn't be certain that either position was correct. Assuming that a large number of parents were on the opposing side, it would be hard to say that calling off the trip was wrong. If it were true that the shock of visiting Hiroshima had produced healthy changes in the handicapped children, then last year's journey to Hiroshima was undoubtedly an excellent learning experience. But how had the horror of nuclear weapons been explained to the children, particularly those who were gravely afflicted, and what evidence had they seen of healthy changes resulting?

Handicapped children were not among the ranks of those who created nuclear weapons and deployed them. Clearly, their hands were not stained. Moreover, in the event of a nuclear attack on the cities where they lived, they were certainly the most vulnerable to harm. Handicapped children were entitled to oppose nuclear weapons. I had seen people in wheelchairs participating in antinuclear demonstrations in Hiroshima and had been deeply moved by them and by the student volunteers helping them.

Apart from all that, there was the question of Eeyore the individual. With his sensitivity to death he might comprehend the tragedy of an atom bomb incinerating an entire city, of hundreds of thousands of people dying in that instant and for months afterward and many more than that wounded. Undoubtedly, he would be shocked by the photographs of the dead and the wounded. Given the fear of death already inside him, he might even find himself being driven into the darkness of an enormous shadow of death. And certainly he would change. But this particular change might amount to receiving a wound even his father could never heal for him, to experiencing the destruction and death of a part of his own physical body. “
Uh-oh! One hundred and forty thousand people died from just one bomb! And more died after. There were people who evaporated, the flash of light burned people's shapes into stone steps! Oh, it's really frightening. All those people died!
”

What if Eeyore began expressing thoughts like these habitually? Would it be possible to turn him away from his interior gloom into the light? Even when his own father felt devastated whenever he surveyed the state of nuclear weapons in the world? These were the thoughts that occurred to me and that I expressed. I tried persuading the female instructors that if they were going to expose handicapped children to cruel and terrible realities, they must first consider carefully a mechanism for converting the shock the children were certain to receive into something akin to hope. Children with normal minds might be considered capable of discovering such a mechanism on their own—though surely there were those among them who could not, not only children but also adults—but to expect seriously handicapped children to perform an operation of that kind would be to saddle them with a heavier burden than they could bear.

The disappointed teachers eventually fell silent and moved away; but the problem they had presented me with remained alive. Hadn't I myself failed to create a mechanism that would allow the consciousness of the tragedy of war including nuclear weapons to open on the prospect of hope? Hadn't I failed, in other words, to provide Eeyore with a definition that would permit him to convert the shock he would receive into something positive? I could feel these concerns pushing me toward a musical about powerless people and their role in avoiding the horrors of war.

That week I wrote a script I called “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People.” A stage was to be created in the gymnasium at the facility, and a curtain would be lowered halfway. Installed in the center of the space that remained visible below would be a single, giant, papier-mâché foot that was cut off by the curtain just above the ankle. The chorus of handicapped children, including those sitting in wheelchairs, would be grouped around the foot. Gulliver's voice was to echo down from speakers high above his giant foot and behind the curtain.

When it was time to entrust the script to Eeyore, I drew a diagram of the stage as I explained the action. Eeyore knew about plays: his special class at middle school had staged
The Giant Turnip,
and I tried using examples from that experience to talk about the large papier-mâché foot, but I couldn't be sure from what he said, and this troubled me, whether he had understood the story: “
Oh boy: That's a big foot! That's a good one. Is it Papas foot? I cant write music for a story so long. It's a major work, wouldn't you say? It's difficult, wouldn't you say? I can't do this one. I always forget everything!
”

Mrs. T and Eeyore's younger sister encouraged him to begin work. His sister broke down the script into short scenes and drew a storyboard. Eeyore had chosen to see Gulliver's foot as identical to his father's, but his sister drew Gulliver's face to look exactly like Eeyore's own and this seemed to awaken his interest. Mrs. T selected from among Eeyore's compositions the strongest melodies and organized them in a kind of inventory catalogue. At each piano lesson, she helped Eeyore choose melodies that seemed to fit verses in my script and pieced them together to build the score. When they had sounded out a melody and the harmony to accompany it side by side at the piano, Eeyore's job was to transcribe it on five-stave paper in time for the next lesson.

I made only one request regarding the music. I had written the lines of the king's speech to fit a song Eeyore had already composed for another occasion, the first track-and-field-day ceremony of his own school, Bluebird Special Facility. “The Bluebird March,” as it was called, began slowly and then at the refrain became an allegro using triplets in a way that conveyed tension. I asked that the march be transposed to a minor key and made to fit my lyrics. As I had expected, the music conveyed perfectly the blend of panache and whininess that was the king's special flavor. Once Eeyore began working on the tune I often heard my wife singing the king's speech in the kitchen:

The whole family participated in completing the musical. Eeyore's younger brother pronounced my script too long and wanted it pared down until only a logical framework remained. He also discovered on my library shelves a book on stage design and devoted ten days to building a model of the set. In this way, with everyone pitching in, “Gulliver's Foot and the Country of the Little People” was completed. But shortly after we had sent it off to the facility we received a request to simplify it further in consideration of the children's ability and performance time. Once again we went back to Mrs. T, and with her help we created a final version. I succeeded in convincing Eeyore of the need to revise the script, but when it came to actually redoing the arrangements he couldn't be bothered. Apparently, it was in the essential act of creating the composition that he found his pleasure and his ability to concentrate.