午夜剧场

From September 2015 to October 2021, I had the privilege of writing a series of 74 installments for the magazine “Ongaku no Tomo.” The first 24 installments, titled “The Attic of an 80-Year-Old,” focused on my relationships with various composers. The remaining 50 installments were titled “Light and Wind of Haikupohja,” where I wrote down my occasional thoughts without a specific theme. Haikupohja is my villa in Central Finland, 230 kilometers north of Helsinki. Every summer, my wife Maria and I spend two months there quietly by ourselves; the surroundings are nothing but forests and lakes, and we rarely see anyone. There was no running water, and we used spring water for drinking.

In compiling this into a single book, I organized the content into two parts. One is about the composers I have been involved with throughout my long life, and the other is about the countries I have traveled to as a performer and the people I met there. The life of a pianist who continues to travel while performing is, in a sense, like that of a monk or a mendicant priest, and the relationships with various people and nature that emerge during that journey are once-in-a-lifetime encounters.

“Humans are born to die.” Takashi Tachibana, who was called a giant of intellect, was deeply impressed by these words spoken by an elder of an indigenous tribe on a South Pacific island. In the creation myth of the Navajo people of North America, a wind god named Nilch'i Ligai gives life to all living things on this earth at the moment of their birth. Humans live only as long as the wind blows inside their bodies; when the wind stops, they lose their words and die. Michio Mamiya's work “Sign of the Wind” was inspired by these words. On the other hand, Yoshinao Nakada, who was drafted during the war, was more stoic, saying, “If I'm going to die anyway, I want to die an intellectual death, so I volunteered for the air corps. People seeing me off told me I'd come back alive, but such platitudes were useless; there was no way I could come back alive.” After the war, Nakada returned to the world of composition and left behind masterpieces such as “Summer Memories” and “The Town Where Snow Falls.” Among the composers were those who attended the Juku, such as Hikaru Hayashi and Takashi Yoshimatsu, and I wanted to write about the inner thoughts that each of them expressed.

On March 26, while I was writing, my wife Maria passed away. It was cancer. We spent the last three weeks together at home without any pain or suffering. She watched me write 20 new chapters and play the piano in the room next to her sickbed. Just as she always did.

Izumi Tateno

Ongaku No Tomo Sha

272 pages, 2,530 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.