Novel Readings

Probably most of the audience here knew the piece. But knowing it only made them eagerly anticipate the high point all the more. Masaru’s heart beat faster. And as always it struck him: What a truly emotionally rousing melody!

It could be performed thousands, tens of thousands, of times, and this melody would never ever wear thin. It moved you, no matter how many times you heard it. It struck you right in the heart.

The highest form of human achievement was music. This is what he thought.

Human beings might have dirty, repulsive aspects to them, but out of the sordid swamp that was humanity—no, it was precisely because of this chaotic swamp—the beautiful lotus flower of music would bloom.

Reading Riku Onda’s Honeybees and Distant Thunder was a very odd experience: I found it both lovely and boring, not at different points but all the time, at the same time.

The novel follows four pianists through all of the rounds of a prestigious competition. They are very different characters, from different backgrounds and with different styles of interpreting and playing their pieces. I have read other novels about musicians—Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field is a particular favorite—but I have never read one in which so much time and so many words are spent conveying, through description, metaphor, and storytelling, what pieces of music sound like: what images they convey or animate the performer, what moods or emotions or sensations they create. A sample:

The music shifted to the second piece in Estampes, ‘Evening in Granada.’

The audience was transported in a moment to a world redolent of Islam.

The word Granada conjured up all sorts of associations. It was in Andalusia, in southern Spain, a region where Christianity and Islam had intersected. The clear dark blue sky was being absorbed by the gathering twilight. The white pillars, evenly spaced down a hallway, were steeped in the glow of the setting sun, and the word infinite came to mind.

The rhythm of the habanera. Women with raven-dark hair, clutching fans, dancing.

Something here, too, raised its head from the sea of emotion lying deep within. An uneasy, cheerless late afternoon.

Twilight, where the blessings and curses of life merged.

It was completely imbued with this.

A rose madder hue lay over the audience as this evening shone down from the stage.

Kanade was riveted to her seat.

Something like a huge wall of energy was thrusting out from the stage, literally pinning her to her seat.

She felt parched and hesitated even to breathe.

Typing that passage out, it struck me even more strongly than it did as I was reading through the book that the other reaction I sometimes (maybe too often) had was that it was a bit ridiculous: overwritten, trying too hard, straining after both effect and affect. I’m wary about judgments like this with works in translation: perhaps in the original Japanese there is a cadence or a poetry that hasn’t quite come across in the English version.

A lot of the novel is this kind of fanciful description highlighting either the performer’s point of view or that of the audience in general or, as here, a particular listener. I appreciated the concept—is it even possible to convey the experience of music in words?—a lot, but I also got tired of it because it just didn’t work for me. I was not rapt or moved or ecstatic; I was never brought into a state where I shared in a different medium the delights of those involved in the performances. And yet there was something delightful about the attempt itself.

There is also something just nice about the book, because the four characters it highlights care about music more than about competing. They are rivals in the competition but become caught up in each other’s playing. It’s not as simplistic as them rooting for each other instead of for themselves; it’s that as they listen to each other, they hear possibilities that excite them, idiosyncrasies that surprise them, and beauty that inspires them. It’s sweet. Their intersecting stories provide some structure for the novel as a whole, and by the end I was curious to find out who would win and why, but the outcome seemed almost beside the point by the novel’s conclusion—which I think is the point. After all, as one of the judges reflects, “could you really score art?”

I picked up Honeybees and Distant Thunder because it is Women in  Translation month. I hadn’t heard of it before I found it at the bookstore, but it has apparently been a huge bestseller in Japan and has even been made into a movie. I’m intrigued by that: a movie would bring back the music itself, replacing the abundant (possibly over-abundant) descriptions of it. What would be left? The personalities of the players: that’s really all, along with the relationships that develop between them. Adaptations of novels always lose the language, the writing. In this case I guess I would consider that both a loss (because turning music into words is what the novel does) and a gain (because in the end I would rather listen to music than read about it).