The Last Samurai

I had tried to be patient and kind but this was not very nice.

A week went by. I have heard it said that small children have no powers of concentration. What in God’s name is to keep a small child from concentrating on something? L anyway was a monomaniac. He would leap out of bed at 5:00 in the morning, put on four or five sweaters, go downstairs to get out his eight Schwan Stabilo highlighters and get to work. At about 6:30 or so he would rush upstairs to report on his progress waving a fluorescent page in my face and I disapproving of the type of parent who fobs a child off with Wonderful Wonderful would murmur Wonderful and then disarmed by a face like a new penny ask questions. Elephant stampede up and down stairs for a couple of hours & time to get up.

A week as I say went by. One day I snatched a few moments from typing to read Ibn Battuta & L came up and just looked. He didn’t say anything. I knew what this meant: it meant for all my good intentions I had not been very nice. So I said: Would you like to learn it? And he naturally said he would so I went through the whole procedure again, and I gave him a little animal fable to read in Kalilah wa Dimnah. And now each night I would look up the next twenty words in each book and write them down for him so that it would not be so boring for him at 5:00 in the morning.

Four days went by. I tried to be careful but you can’t always be careful and one day I went to look something up in Isaiah. I got out my Tanach and he came over and looked and that was that.

I am reading Let’s Learn Kana—the EASY Way!!!! L is reading Jock of the Bushveld.

I try to imagine presenting this to a small child.

This is not going to work.

6

We Never Do Anything

A week went by and it was a bright, windy day. There were pale green buds on the bare black boughs of the trees. I thought we should get some fresh air but the wind was too bitter.

We took the Circle Line in a counterclockwise direction. I was still struggling to devise a system for explaining the kana (let alone the badly eroded remains of the 262 kanji once known to me let alone the 1,945 kanji in common use in Japan let alone the fragments of grammar gleaned from Kanji from the Start and the Reader of Handwritten Japanese). L was reading Odyssey 24. The problem was not so much a dictionary problem as the fact that L was completely fed up with the Circle Line.

After a couple of hours I began to look through one of the papers. There was an interview of the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto, who was currently on concert tour in Britain.

Whether Yamamoto was taught a simple task on a daily basis I do not know, but he had once been famous for being a prodigy. He was older now, and for the past two years he had just been notorious.

Yamamoto had started winning prizes and giving concerts when he was about 14; when he was 19 he had gone to Chad. He had then returned to concertising & created a sensation at the Wigmore Hall. People had of course gone to the Wigmore Hall expecting a sensation, but they had not expected him to play about 20 minutes of drum music after each of six Mazurkas of a Chopin recital. This was followed by the rest of the advertised programme (which was also expanded slightly to permit an unexpected replay of the six Mazurkas), with the result that the concert ended at 2:30 in the morning & people missed their trains & were unhappy.

After the Wigmore Hall episode his agent was quoted as saying that on a purely personal level he looked on him as a son but on a purely business level there were a lot of considerations, obviously they were both professionals & he wouldn’t be doing him any favours if he continued to handle him purely as a personal favour.

Yamamoto hardly ever gave concerts now & no one knew whether this was his own choice or forced on him by prudent managements. The interviewer of the Sunday Times was trying to probe this and other hot topics while Yamamoto tried to explore the nature of percussion & other musical issues.

ST: I don’t think anyone really understands why you went to Chad—

Yamamoto: Well, my teacher had always emphasised that one should keep the piano from sounding like a percussive instrument—you probably know that Chopin tried to produce the effect of a vocal line on the piano—and for years I kept thinking: But if it’s a percussive instrument why shouldn’t it sound like one?