At the End of the Matinee

by Keiichirō Hirano

Brilliance and desolation appear intermittently in the record of their lives. Joy and sadness play tug-of-war. This is all the more reason why the alignment of their souls possesses a quality that is rare in today’s world—a quality that I shall call, if I may, beauty.

In 2006, classical guitarist Satoshi Makino turned thirty-eight.

In short, the music was so persuasively rendered that, regardless of one’s personal likes and dislikes, it was impossible to find fault with any of it.

At the encore, as if on cue, the audience rose in a standing ovation. While clapping, people leaned backward slightly and thrust their arms forward as far as they could in hopes of getting him to hear them. The height of clapping hands rises in direct proportion to the degree the applauder is moved; this was another thing the audience discovered that evening.

“This is Yoko Komine. She’s a reporter for the French news agency RFP.”

“I was entranced.” She laid a hand on her breast and smiled without exaggeration. Her voice was low and resonant—a cultivated voice, he thought. “It was as if the music were taking me to some far-off place, urging me to come along, leading me gently by the hand.”

“Because her grandmother died at that stone, her memory of playing there as a child will never be the same. Isn’t that right? In her mind, the two stones are one and the same. And as a result, that childhood memory has now become painful.”

Listening to a musical theme develop, you come to see that it contained a certain potentiality all along. Once you follow it to the end, the theme never sounds the same again.

Love this idea

Music doesn’t just progress forward in a straight line but works backward into the past as well. Without understanding that, you would never appreciate the fascination of the fugue.”

“People think that only the future can be changed, but in fact, the future is continually changing the past. The past can and does change. It’s exquisitely sensitive and delicately balanced.”

The pleasure of having someone understand sank deep inside him, made him ecstatic. This was not something he was used to by any means.

As their relationship developed, the long night of their first encounter came back to them frequently in memory as something special.

Amid the swirling rapids of time’s ceaseless rush downstream to the past, it shone with a soft and lonely light—while beyond lay the vast ocean of oblivion.

“Music is born in opposition to the beauty of silence; the creation of music lies in the attempt to use sound to bring about new beauty that contrasts with the beauty of silence.”

Silence is beautiful, and so is beautiful music

Music had to offer something that made you willing to listen, even at the sacrifice of such beauty.

In exchange for the privilege of life, individuals in the modern world put up with ceaseless clamor. Not only noises but images, smells, tastes, perhaps even the warmth of others . . . all of it rushing at them in a mad free-for-all, each bit screaming its presence. And society, still unsatisfied, crammed in yet more, until one’s very sense of time was destroyed. It was unbearable, human exhaustion.

Caught up in the tempo of machines and computers, their senses buffeted by constant noise, people griped about daily life with piteous intensity before entering the complete silence obtainable only by death.

A concert hall, before it held music, was a place enclosing sheer silence within its walls. A refuge for silence found nowhere else in society, nor in the natural world.

Never thought about this but I love it

Since she lacked religious faith, she thought first of her mother and father and silently called to them for help. Then she prayed to a nameless greater power after all.

But today, the scale of the explosions must have been greater than usual, for the smoke did not die down. It was as if someone from the underworld kept dribbling the black ink of death onto the town.

In times like these, whoever has lived yesterday and today encounters so many events piled together that he has already lived years.’

I’ve never worked it out from the perspective of the past—that the war was wrong to begin with—never mind the future, what to do now that it’s come to this.” “Nobody has. War and police action to preserve the peace are getting harder and harder to distinguish in this so-called war on terror.”

About Bush's war in Iraq

“His gift is like . . . a paper airplane that God folded and let fly just for fun. It appeared high in the heavens one day and just keeps on going, flying and flying and never falling to earth. The line it traces is a thing of beauty.” “Don’t tell that to your fiancé.” “Why not?” “He’ll figure out that you’re in love.”

Yoko finally wrapped up her work just three days before it was time to go home. Then one night, taking a break from packing, she went out to linger on the balcony, coffee cup in hand. Baghdad nights were the most complete silence she had ever known in her life.

I want to see him again. Yet his three emails expressing concern about her welfare remained unanswered. In her desire to write back properly, she’d let day after day go by. She needed to let him know that she was safe. And thank him. She wanted him to know how much his music meant to her. Somewhere inside, she knew she wanted to write more than that. “You’re in love,” Philip had said. That one uncalled-for remark was working on her emotions, propelling them in a direction from which there could be no turning back.

He had no doubt now that he wanted her to love him. Deep within him, a light shone as bright as day, a brightness that he found blinding.

Perhaps she loved him too. Every time he found a sign that she might, he felt the anguish of love, yet when he reconsidered and thought he must be wrong, he was in anguish again. He tried to consider rationally whether he was worthy of her love, but that had the opposite effect. Such were the humbling effects of love.

Love really is agonizing and humbling

The value of work and hobbies was the easy comfort they provided to lonely people who suffered from not being loved because they were not beautiful or lively. But such people forgot to dream fervently of becoming beautiful or lively in order to be loved.

True - people who forget that they have a personal beauty become lonely

What was love if it failed to inspire the desire to be worthy of the one you cherished?

She found rather that she needed time to adjust to the excess around her. But being in a place where from sunrise to sunset there was never the sound of bombs quietly eased the lingering tension inside her.

Her life was moving forward smoothly. And then came Makino—a flame igniting the heart she’d thought had outgrown passion, engulfing it all at once in a fire that only grew ever more consuming.

Yoko yielded to his importuning, and also hesitantly went along with his desire not to use protection. But after he went back to New York and she was alone again, she thought of Makino with enormous guilt. She even toyed with the idea of ceasing contact with her fiancé, all for the sake of a relationship that had barely begun.

The many encomiums on Makino’s music pleased her inordinately, as she was beginning to feel something akin to love for him.

I didn't know this word, "encomium", a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly.

Her growing sense that she might be someone who could understand and console him brought a special happiness and even some relief.

At the same time, it was she who was subjecting herself to the touch of those dirty hands. Sadly, she was forced to admit that the stirrings of her love for him contained some negativity regarding the dazzle of his genius. The first time she’d heard him play at eighteen in the Salle Pleyel, hadn’t she been put off for that very reason?

Thomas Mann, expounding on “the gulf between greatness and the masses,” w...

Not only Goethe but all geniuses must be, to an extent, a source of pressure on the lives of those around them.

Now Yoko couldn’t help wondering, What exactly might he find special in her? She was thrilled to think he had gone out of his way to come to Paris to see her, and would do so again. But what if there were other women at various points on his tour? It wouldn’t be at all strange.

What if she herself were to become “that sort of woman”? She considered the possibility calmly. Was it something she could bear? That she could even entertain such a thought only showed the importance Makino had taken on in her life. And if she couldn’t bear it, then what quality did she possess that could make him love her and her alone? Her thoughts traveled in an anxious circle.

After seeing him again today and realizing how much she enjoyed being with him, the thought that she might no longer be in a position to accept his love was devastating. The irrepressible love she felt for him was painful.

“I sometimes think beauty must be worn out from being saddled with such cumbersome tasks all the time.”

But beauty isn’t only an agent of expression. It has equal power to enable us to turn our eyes away momentarily from the horrors of this world, doesn’t it?”

So many people here have ancestors who lived someplace completely different, several generations back. Which probably explains the rise of nationalism, to an extent.”

Not sure I understand why this would explain rise of nationalism

When I listen to you perform, I always marvel that you can play music from so many different countries and ages, almost as if you had composed it yourself.”

For the longest time, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Like many people. Actually, I think journalism suits me. I get to cover all sorts of world events, meet all kinds of people and hear their stories. People I would never have a chance of meeting on my own open right up to me when I say I’m an RFP reporter, and answer my questions.

But all we do is acquire broad superficial knowledge of many things, so I really admire someone like you who pursues one thing deeply and single-mindedly.”

This is the age of globalism. It may sound funny, but really I landed in Baghdad before I quite knew what was happening. All sorts of things punch holes in our destiny, I think. Without there being anything we can do about it. And sometimes it may be a bullet. That’s what it comes down to.”

All sorts of things punch holes in our destiny

“If I ever heard that in some corner of the earth you had died, I would die too.”

If I could always be with you, and you always confided in me, I could support you in other ways, but that’s not possible. All I could come up with was to say what I said just now. It may sound dumb, but I said it, and I will absolutely keep my word.”

“Your existence has punched a hole in my life. Or rather, it’s embedded deep within me.”