My wife was pleased to see me again, but I noticed that she was even more pleased to see Sherlock Holmes, a matter that rather perplexed me.
16Readers are reminded of Holmes’ seminal monograph on the matter, On the care of the Queen Bee and observations on its reaction to Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Opus 78, which was received with great acclaim at the Royal Society.
Epilogue
O Stranger
Let the first red rays of the rising sun caress your eyelids
while you meditate
Let the Buddha of Kamakura speak to you in silence
The early hours of the morning at Sagami Bay are like those on any other day: the Pacific lapping at the beach, the sound of crashing waves, the hiss of the mist, the salty tang in the air. From beneath the sea, the fish look up as the first rays of light diffuse into the restless water. The terns and gulls squawk unpleasantly but with happiness. In the death of others is the guarantee of their own life.
Many men have left the shores of Yokohama and returned as tormented ghosts held in an embrace by the spray of the surging waves. Time continues to paint everything gently. Love evaporates and kisses the restless gull; ambition disintegrates into the sand and slides down, down, several feet below. No man shall be spared death. The Amitabha Buddha of Kamakura will watch over acts of passion and hate, of evil and tenderness.
The fishing boats will take an hour to return from their overnight journeys. Hideo, the vagrant philosopher-poet, sits quietly on his haunches on the beach, letting the water touch him from time to time. Yes, there is a hint of red in the clouds and slowly, with a vicious intent, the red spreads over the bay. Hideo now sees a sea of blood in which even the ghosts have been drenched.
He walks along the beach wondering what the sea may have decided to reject today. It is the usual—dead fish, a couple of writhing eels approaching the inevitable, many shells and pieces of wood from ships that rest in the sea several fathoms below.
In the swampy area far from the harbour, he sees a larger shadow. Ah, perhaps a whale or a shark. He walks through the muck and the weeds, his feet making a sucking noise as he moves one leg and then the other. A few nesting birds squawk in alarm and anger and fly away, the sound of their flapping mixing with the dull thunder from below the sea.
A shark? An octopus? No. The light is not strong enough. He ventures closer and looks carefully.
A body hugs the swamp, face down. A man in a Western suit. Who is he? Why did he depart this way? Was he asked to? Who shall say?
Hideo looks back at Sagami Bay. The red is even more profound, but again, a sliver of sunlight edges up and meets a passing cloud.
The Buddha of Kamakura continues to meditate, his gentle smile frozen as it has been for so many years.
Two gulls fly upwards in joy, silently.
The Ghosts of Music
by Akira Yamashita
That which is music is divine. That which is not is merely transient, tinsel.
I say nothing new, yes. Through the decades of my career as a classical koto player in Kyoto, I had vaguely recognized the vibrations my music had provoked within spirits in other worlds. Of course, the potent realization came to me slowly while I explored the steel strings, touching and moving with changing speed and pressure over many years. Till the age of fifty, this (the issue of music extending its tendrils into a secret world) was known perfunctorily and explained in words to awed audiences to help create a halo around me and—I say this without shame, as I had to make a living, after all—to make money. The real truth needed maturity and solitude and there was no substitute for the passage of time.
And so it was that one night, as I sat in darkness in my hut on a small cliff overlooking Osaka Bay, exploring new sounds on my koto on the balcony, I chanced upon a note that I had not heard in all the years of relentless practice. That of course is nothing new, for music is an onion, and unpeeling it never ends. Sound is a continuum and the intensity, juxtaposition, and context makes a note different each time it is invoked. Alas, the weak and music mad live only in these haunted spaces, restlessly seeking more and more gratification and the rest of their lives erode, in the company of impatient men and women, with more pressing material and chimerical needs; a writer I know once said .. “There was music elsewhere. In the soft whispers of the leaves deep inside jungles. Lovely notes and sounds that only we heard. In the black airless spaces between planets where lost souls roamed restlessly crying out for their partners.” I felt that way too and became more and more interested in it as, curiously, I felt my virtuosity decline while my intellect was stimulated further and further. But I digress.
This sound was different. I had applied the right pressure at the right place and a sound came out that seemed, in its glorious vibration, a summary of the Universe.
As it floated away into the night air, and I tried to enjoy my ecstatic immobilization, I became conscious of a presence. Against the night sky, I saw a nebulous white silhouette. My fanciful mind imagined that it was the ghost of a woman. And indeed it became so—a woman of astonishing beauty, her hair waving gently and her feminine form undulating and shimmering. Her eyes seemed moist. I had an overwhelming inexplicable feeling—the image was the sound—the sound was the image. She looked at me with the deepest sorrow. I imagined that she said Why did you release me? How this hurts—I now must float forever, searching for love, for him whom I lost, from him whom I escaped, caught in the whorls of a hidden note. And now, now you have released me. Why, oh why? Why? Her tears spread like pearl necklaces across the night sky.
I was overwhelmed by the deepest guilt and my own tears burst out. But my fingers were stuck to the same point on the string and I kept repeating the note like a man possessed, bent on drowning in quicksand. I could not stop—she wept and she wept and the sky seemed to break up into a million pieces.
The night passed, though time had stood still. The morning sun touched Osaka and the spell was broken. But I was too devastated to function, and for the first time ever, I canceled my classes. My students inquired if I was unwell and needed help.
The next evening, I tried again. But even though I had marked the spot with a piece of chalk, I failed to find the note. I tried everything but the note was elusive and declined to reveal itself.
But, as though by instinct, but probably more by accident, I touched a completely different string at a different spot. And this time, the note was low and threatening, echoing ominously in a room that had been designed specifically to ensure no echoes.
I felt the rush of evil spirits about me, roughly caressing my hands and arms in a gesture of thanks, applying cruel pressure on my fingers to ensure that I would keep playing, releasing more and more of their friends. I tried to close my eyes, but to no avail. Bright evil danced in front of my eyes, as each sound morphed into a key to release evil trapped in the ether about my koto string. Ah, the feeling of reeling horror, of utterly hopeless tragedy and cruel depravity, of decay and ruin, of gruesome putrefication…. Much, much beyond what men could even imagine….an eternal reality far beyond our shallow temporal one. My body shook but my fingers stayed firm, as a thunderstorm broke out spontaneously and rain poured down outside. On the clouds above, the released spirits of evil painted their plans, while the puzzled citizens of Osaka merely looked up and unfolded their umbrellas, shutting out the final warning.
I awoke the next morning, and stared at my koto. That which had nourished my body for so many years now threatened to savage my soul, with messages of love and evil that could never be reconciled. Now, when I tried to find the night’s note, I again failed to find it and was grateful for it. I sat back, trembling. I knew not what I had accidentally unleashed. I called my students and cancelled my classes again. They were astonished. I slept the whole day; it was a restless and tormented sleep.
Now my eyesight and sense of touch had become acute. I actually felt th
at the string had developed kinks and was no longer the smooth metallic continuous piece I had known. I understood now that other emotions were seeking to come alive again and were craving my attention. But I had aged twenty years in a couple of nights and feared to touch my instrument. My human trappings were too weak to comprehend and decipher the complex notions finding release one by one from the world of sound into the world of you and me.
The koto moved and shifted in my living room, threatening me physically. I, Shohei Yamada, once hailed as the greatest koto player of all time—I, I was powerless to act against my own music. For a while, I tried to satisfy the koto and released vapors of emotions bound by sounds I had never heard. Whether the most caressing tenderness or the roughest projection of power, an unfathomable meditative ocean or an acute nervousness—I experienced them all. But soon my physical limitations came to my defense and my complete lack of strength forced me to stop. The koto moved and shook, and the strings hummed together in anger. My arms were cut cruelly by the strings as they lacerated me, forcing me to play, but I could do nothing. I prayed for release.
And one night, while I was asleep and while I was awake, I suddenly found strength and grasped the koto and lifted it up. I went to the open window and hurled it out into the air.
As it fell, the strings came apart, and then came together, distinct from the body of the instrument, which fell on the seashore and shattered into a million pieces.
The strings formed a noose and rose slowly into the air and toward me. I retreated into my apartment, shaking with fear, closing the balcony’s windows behind me, wanting to shut out what I simply did not want anymore. The metallic noose entered as well, passing through the windows as though they did not exist.
My time has come. I write this farewell note as the noose fastens itself to a hook on the ceiling, knowing the inevitability of my forthcoming action. It has waited for the past half hour, patiently, for what is time to it?
In the room, sitting on the sofa to witness the deed, are the ghosts of music that I helped release.
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Sherlock Holmes, The Missing Years, Japan Page 25
